Introduction

Meet Edward — an open-source AI assistant that remembers everything.

What is Edward?

Edward is a full-stack AI assistant built for personal use. He runs on your Mac, stores memories in PostgreSQL, and gets smarter the more you talk to him. Think of him as a private ChatGPT that actually knows who you are.

Edward is powered by Claude (Anthropic), orchestrated with LangGraph, and extended through a modular skills system that includes messaging (iMessage, SMS, WhatsApp), code execution, web search, Apple services integration, and more.

What Does Edward Stand For?

Enhanced Digital Workflow Assistant for Routine Decisions

  • Enhanced — learns from every conversation with long-term memory
  • Digital — lives on your machine, integrates with your apps
  • Workflow — automates messaging, scheduling, research, and coding tasks
  • Assistant — proactive, not just reactive — monitors messages and acts on your behalf
  • Routine — handles the repetitive stuff so you can focus on what matters
  • Decisions — provides context-aware answers informed by your history

Default Personality

Out of the box, Edward's system prompt includes the instruction:

Be concise, friendly, helpful, and a tad cheeky when you feel like it.

You can customize this in the Settings page to match your preferred communication style.

Key Differentiators

  • Long-term memory — hybrid vector + keyword search across facts, preferences, context, and instructions. Edward remembers what you told him last week, last month, or last year.
  • Self-hosted — your data stays on your machine. No third-party storage, no vendor lock-in. Just PostgreSQL and your Anthropic API key.
  • Extensible skills — enable and disable integrations from the settings UI. Edward can send texts, search the web, execute code, manage your calendar, and install new MCP servers at runtime.
  • Proactive heartbeat — monitors your iMessage, calendar, and email for items that need attention, triaging and responding autonomously when appropriate.
  • Scheduled actions — Edward can schedule reminders, messages, and tasks for the future. He fires them himself using the same tool loop he uses in conversation.
Edward settings dashboard showing all available skill panels
The settings dashboard — toggle skills, manage MCP servers, browse memories, and more.
Edward sidebar showing conversation filters for Heartbeat, Scheduled, Inbound, and Workers
Conversation filters — sort by User, Heartbeat, Scheduled, Inbound, and Worker conversations.

How It Works (High Level)

  1. You send a message through the web UI (or iMessage, SMS, WhatsApp)
  2. Edward retrieves relevant memories from your history
  3. The LangGraph agent processes your message with full tool access
  4. Edward responds, then extracts any new memories to store
  5. Background systems enrich, reflect on, and consolidate memories over time

Choose Your Path

  • Beginner Guide — never used a terminal? Start here.
  • Setup with AI — paste one block into an AI coding assistant and let it handle everything.
  • Getting Started — comfortable with the terminal? Quick 5-minute path.