A personal context engine on your hardware.
Carabase reads your calendars, mail, code, meetings, and notes through connectors you control. Ask any question; the engine returns the answer in under 10 ms with sourced citations. Bodies stay on your hardware. Plugs into Claude, OpenClaw, or any MCP-capable agent.
Sarah confirmed the indemnity cap stays at 1× ARR. She asked for the survival period to move from 12 to 18 months — you said you’d come back on that by Friday.
Carabase is a personal context engine on top of a personal data mesh. The mesh is your calendars, mail, code, browser, photos, messages, and health — pulled in through connectors you control, stored on hardware you own, with retention and materialization you set. The engine is what runs over it: a typed knowledge graph with provenance, a memory network for sense-making, and a deterministic router that returns in under 10 ms.
Both are yours, materially. This document lays out the problem the category got wrong, the architecture we built instead, and the surfaces — Host, Desktop, CLI, iOS, MCP — through which you drive it.
Carabase reads from sources you authorize — through
connectors with explicit scopes, OAuth or local-file access, and a
visible audit trail. Bodies stay on your hardware: the
substrate is Postgres + pgvector on a machine you own; the master key
lives in your env; connector tokens are encrypted at rest. LLM
inference is the part that travels — point it at
ollama for fully local, or pick an API per role.
The full architecture lives at /architecture. The connector matrix lives at /connectors.
Four surfaces, all yours, all talking to each other over a private mesh that never touches the public internet — plus a fifth row for agents.
Postgres + pgvector + typed knowledge graph + memory network + MCP server. Runs on your own hardware. Zero public ports. Nightly harvest, synthesis, dream cycle.
Rust. Tauri. Native. Cmd+K everywhere. Daily log, summon panel, ambient graph, command palette, ingestion controller, HITL review queue.
carabase init in 7 steps. Pipe a note from stdin.
Stream an agent run with --watch. Search semantic +
hybrid. Wire it into your shell. Headless-first.
Share extension. Siri Shortcuts. Lock Screen widget. HealthKit + Photos + Significant Locations + Shortcuts inbox. Walking-with-a-podcast in < 3 s.
Every retrieval and write surface is exposed as an MCP tool. Claude Desktop, OpenClaw, your custom agent — they all query the same substrate. Plugins for new connectors. Open-source Host. Heterogeneous stacks welcome.
Median p50 across 1,000 internal-corpus queries on an Apple M2 Pro Mac mini, hybrid + graph + temporal paths. Excludes any LLM call. Methodology: /architecture.
No LLM in the retrieval loop.
Every other "AI" search pipeline: query → embed → vector search → feed results to LLM → LLM picks the best one → return. Slow because an LLM is involved. Also a pyromaniac's approach to tokens.
Ours: a deterministic router across six substrates — a typed knowledge graph for relationships, a semantic index for meaning, a metadata index for time and source, an entity resolver for names, a hypothesis verifier for claims, and an associative memory network for sense-making. Postgres, pgvector, GIN indexes, and a graph traversal each do their job in single-digit milliseconds. We let them.
The full case for the personal context engine — why the current tools are broken, what we built instead, and how to get the most out of it.
The indictment. Five failures of the personal AI status quo and how they compound into the mess we all live inside.
The category correction. A personal context engine — temporal, provenance-aware, agent-native, and on hardware you own.
A practical guide for the first thirty days. Five workflows. Concrete examples. The habits that take it from "interesting" to "can't work without."
The questions that come up most often. Longer answers live in the manifesto.
carabase command (alias
cb) is a peer to the Desktop UI, not an afterthought.
cb init is a 7-step interactive wizard.
cb agent run "summarize my week" --watch streams a
live agent run. cb chat ask "what did I commit to last
Tuesday" opens an SSE chat session. cb import upload
notes.zip migrates from Obsidian / Logseq / Notion / Bear /
Roam / Reflect. Every write verb takes
--idempotency-key so retries are safe.
cb --json for scripting,
cb --watch for streaming,
cb --env to switch between dev / staging / prod.
See the CLI page.
utilityHigh for reasoning,
utilityLow for high-volume background work,
embedding for vectorization,
visualUtility for vision,
image_embedding for visual similarity. Each role
picks a provider independently; mix and match.
Carabase is in early access for technical users — engineers, builders, executives, and anyone whose bottleneck is context. Join the waitlist.