AI Friend is a local-first AI companion you describe in your own words — a persona compiler, an endocrine layer that measurably modulates how the model generates, a memory system that learns its own associations, and a cloned voice, all running on your own hardware. It's built as an open project: the code, the reasoning behind it, and the way it's governed are all public — including what was tried and didn't work, in the docs.
AI Friend is released under the MIT license — a permissive license. You can use it, modify it, and ship it in a commercial product without asking permission or paying anything; the only real condition is keeping the copyright notice intact. Like almost all open-source licenses, it comes with no warranty.
Read the full license on GitHubContributions go through a branch and a pull request against `main`. New tests are expected to be mutation-tested — break the code they cover and confirm they fail — and the full backend suite plus `ruff check .` need to be green before it's done. `.agents/CONTEXT.md`, the engineering ledger, records what was actually built and measured; it's worth reading before a non-trivial change.
Read the contributing guide on GitHubThis is currently a single-maintainer project. Day-to-day decisions go through PR review; architectural decisions — anything touching the cognitive core, the affect model, or the persona boundary — are made by the lead maintainer, with the reasoning recorded rather than left implicit.
Read the governance doc on GitHubNo conversation leaves your hardware by default, and nothing here collects telemetry. If you find a vulnerability, the ask is simple: don't open a public issue. Report it privately first, so there's a fix out before the details are.
Read the full security policy on GitHubThe short version: be someone people want to collaborate with. Disagreements about code and design are normal and welcome; personal attacks and bad-faith arguments aren't. The full policy is adapted from the Contributor Covenant, and it's the same standard for everyone — maintainers included.
Read the code of conduct on GitHub