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What Is Anyy

Anyy is a resident, local-first, multi-surface personal assistant. It runs as a long-lived process on your own machine, keeps your conversations and memory in a local store, and is reachable from several surfaces at once — a terminal UI, a command line, a local dashboard, and messaging channels.

This page is the concept entry point for the wiki. It explains the mental model, who Anyy is for, and how the pieces fit together, then links out to the page that covers each area in depth.

Anyy in One Minute​

You start Anyy once, and it stays running. From then on you can talk to it from your terminal, fire off a one-shot question on the command line, or message it from a chat app — and it is the same assistant, with the same sessions and memory, behind every surface.

Under the hood it runs an agent loop that can call tools (read and edit files, run commands, manage reminders, search the web, and more), pull in reusable skills, remember things across conversations, and run scheduled or background work on your behalf. Operations that change real state — editing files, running commands, applying configuration — flow through an approval step so nothing risky happens silently.

Anyy is written in Go and ships as a single binary, anyy. The model that powers its reasoning is a configurable backend: you choose and configure the provider during setup. Anyy itself is the product — it is not any one model or provider.

note

Anyy always identifies as Anyy. The underlying model is a swappable backend you configure, not the product's identity. See Configuring Models.

Who It's For​

Anyy is for people who want a personal assistant that lives on hardware they control rather than in someone else's cloud:

  • Local-first users who want their sessions, memory, and credentials to stay on their own machine.
  • People who switch surfaces through the day — terminal at the desk, a chat app on the phone — and want one continuous assistant rather than several disconnected ones.
  • Tinkerers and power users who want to extend the assistant with their own skills and let it use real tools on their system, while keeping state-changing actions behind explicit approvals.

Anyy can run on Linux hosts and control a local system when you enable the optional capability packs for it, but that is opt-in: the default experience is a general-purpose personal assistant, not a system-administration tool.

The Mental Model​

Three words describe how Anyy behaves. Holding them in mind makes the rest of the wiki easier to navigate.

Resident​

Anyy is resident: a long-lived process (the gateway) that you start once and that keeps running in the background. Because it is always on, it can own your active sessions, run scheduled jobs and reminders, poll messaging channels, and pick up background work — none of which would be possible for an assistant that only exists while a single command is in flight. The clients you interact with (terminal UI, CLI, dashboard) are thin front-ends that talk to the resident gateway. See Gateway.

Local-first​

Anyy is local-first: your data lives under an Anyy home directory on your own machine. Sessions, memory, skills, and credentials are stored locally — a local SQLite database is the authoritative store. Secrets are kept on disk and redacted from logs and diagnostics, and the model provider is a backend you point at, so you stay in control of what leaves your machine.

Multi-surface​

Anyy is multi-surface: the same assistant is reachable from many places at once. A terminal UI for interactive work, one-shot commands on the CLI, a local web dashboard, and messaging channels such as chat apps all connect to the same resident runtime. Sessions and memory are shared across surfaces, so a conversation you start in one place stays coherent when you continue it somewhere else.

Core Concepts​

This is the concept map. Each area below gets one or two sentences here and a dedicated page that covers it in full — start with whichever one matches what you want to do.

Sessions & Memory​

A session is a single ongoing conversation with its own history; Anyy keeps sessions so you can resume, search, branch, and compress them across surfaces. Memory is the durable layer that persists facts and preferences across sessions, so the assistant can recall them later.

  • Sessions — how conversations are tracked, resumed, and shared across surfaces.
  • Persistent Memory — how facts persist beyond any single session.

See also Session and Memory in the glossary.

Tools, Toolsets & Skills​

Tools are the concrete actions the assistant can take — reading and editing files, running commands, managing reminders, searching the web. Toolsets group related tools so you can control which capabilities are exposed and keep the assistant focused. Skills are reusable, self-contained instruction packets (in the SKILL.md format) that teach the assistant how to do a particular task and load only when needed.

  • Tools — what the assistant can do and how tool use is governed.
  • Toolsets — grouping and exposing capabilities.
  • Skills — packaging reusable know-how with progressive disclosure.

Channels & Gateway​

The gateway is the resident runtime that owns sessions, runs background work, and brokers every surface. Channels connect external messaging platforms to that runtime, so you can talk to Anyy from a chat app and get the same assistant you have in the terminal.

Approvals & ChangePlan​

Before Anyy performs a state-changing or risky action, it pauses for your explicit approval. For larger operations it prepares a ChangePlan — a structured proposal describing what will change, the commands involved, how to verify the result, and how to roll back — which you review and approve before anything executes.

See also ChangePlan in the glossary.

Profiles & Roles​

A profile is an isolated Anyy identity — its own home directory, sessions, memory, skills, and configuration — so you can keep, for example, a personal setup separate from a work setup. A role is a lighter layer within a profile: it shapes persona, tone, and working style, but does not change Anyy's product identity or own data, tools, or permissions.

  • Profiles — isolated identities and their data boundaries.
  • Roles — persona and tone within a profile.

See also Profile and Role in the glossary.

How the Pieces Fit​

Put together, the picture is straightforward. The gateway is the resident core. You reach it from any surface — terminal UI, CLI, dashboard, or a messaging channel. Each surface drives sessions that the gateway owns; those sessions draw on memory for long-term recall and on skills for reusable know-how. During a turn, the assistant calls tools (organized into toolsets) to get real work done. When a tool would change real state, the gateway routes an approval — and, for larger changes, a ChangePlan — back to whichever surface you are on. The whole thing runs inside a profile that isolates your data, optionally flavored by a role that sets the persona.

Everything beyond this overview is covered on its own page; follow the links above to go deeper into any one area.

Where to Go Next​

Ready to use it? The Quickstart walks you from installation through running setup, starting your first chat, and trying the key features. When a term is unfamiliar, the Glossary defines the vocabulary used throughout this wiki.