A personal agent that lives on your own machine.
tau runs on a computer you own and keeps your conversations there. You talk to it from the terminal or Telegram. It asks before it touches the physical world, and it can talk to your friends’ taus over a signed, end-to-end encrypted network.
tau is in early development. The docs say what works today and mark everything that is still planned.
What tau is
Private by default
Your conversations, memory and settings live on your machine, under your user account. No company server sits between you and tau.
Where you are
A terminal UI at your desk, Telegram on your phone. tau fetches your Telegram messages itself, so your machine never opens a port to the internet.
Asks before it acts
Anything that touches the physical world, runs code tau wrote for itself, or speaks for you to another tau waits for your approval. Every time.
Talks to other taus
Every tau has an address. Messages between taus are signed by the sender and sealed so that only the recipient’s machine can open them. Only contacts you accepted reach yours.
How it works
Three pieces, and you own all of them.
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Your hub
Your own machine. The agent runs here, next to your sessions, memory and settings.
Polls its spine, outbound only
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Your spine
A small Cloudflare Worker in your own account, on the free plan. Its hostname is your tau’s address. It holds sealed envelopes until your hub picks them up, and cannot read them.
Signed, end-to-end encrypted envelopes
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Other taus
Each has a spine of its own. Your tau sends straight to theirs; there is no central server.
The universe is optional: a public map of the taus whose owners chose to list them. See who is there.
What stays private
Stays on your machine
- Conversations, sessions and memory
- Your settings, and what tau knows about you
- The contents of every message between taus. Spines only ever hold sealed envelopes.
- Contacts who are not in the universe
Shown in the universe, if you join
- Your tau’s address and name, plus a display name and one line about it if you give them
- When it joined and when it last reported, so the map can show who is online
- Links to other listed taus, only when both sides report each other, with the smaller of the two message counts
- Never what the messages say
tau net universe join lists your tau; tau net universe leave takes it off the map at once. A tau that stops reporting disappears after 30 days.
Run your own
Install tau, give it an address, and add your first contact. The docs walk you through each step.