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Rna Agent

A local-first AI agent workbench for long-running projects.

Projects, not chats. An agent that keeps working in the background, remembers what happened, and tells you when it matters.

Website: www.rna.dev · Download · Why Rna · Features · Quick start · Memory · Web search · Architecture · FAQ · Docs

Rna Agent is a desktop app and command line for working with AI agents on projects that last longer than one conversation: a game, a novel, a research topic, a codebase. You create a project, give it a folder and an introduction, and the agent keeps context across sessions, works in the background when it has something worth doing, and brings you back a short summary instead of a wall of logs.

More at www.rna.dev.

It runs on your machine. Your projects, conversations, memory and keys stay in local files; the only network traffic is to the model and search services you configure.

Download

Get the build for your system from the latest release.

Every release is built by GitHub Actions and started once on its own platform before it is published; the tests themselves run locally before a version is tagged. The macOS builds are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple. The Linux and Windows builds are not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen asks for confirmation the first time (see the release notes).

macOS is where Rna is developed and used every day. Linux and Windows builds run the same code; features that rely on macOS facilities (the command sandbox, the background service manager) are reduced there. Reports from those platforms are very welcome.

Why Rna

Most agent tools are a chat box attached to a model. Rna is built around the parts that matter when work spans days:

• A project is the unit, not a conversation. Projects own a folder, a memory, a set of skills and tools, a schedule and a history. Sessions come and go inside them.
• The agent can work while you are away, and says so. Background investigation, scheduled work and follow-ups run under explicit rules; when you return you get a while you were away summary, and a message you send interrupts background work first, keeping what it did.
• Memory that needs nothing installed. Choose the built-in local memory and conversations and delivered files are searchable on your machine at once; connect an OpenViking server when you want semantic search.
• A cheap judge in front of the expensive model. Routing, "is this worth interrupting you for", "does this need memory" and similar yes/no questions go to a small judgment model (JEV, about a thousandth of the main model's cost) before the main model writes anything.
• Changes are measured, not assumed. Candidate changes to a project's own behavior are evaluated against a frozen baseline and adopted only when they clear explicit gates, with a visible history and one-step revert.

Features

Quick start

From a release

1. Download the file for your platform and open it (macOS: drag Rna Agent to Applications).
2. Settings → Models: add a provider and its key, then pick a default model.
3. Settings → Memory: choose Local memory (built in) for no setup, or connect OpenViking.
4. Optional: Settings → Web tools to let the agent search and read pages.
5. Create a project, point it at a folder, and start a session.

From source

Requires Node.js 22.19 or newer. The host and the SDK have no runtime dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/skingko/rna_dev.git
cd rna_dev/prototypes/control-center

# build the web UI once
npm ci --prefix web && npm run build --prefix web

# start the local service, then open http://127.0.0.1:4317
./rna start

Run the desktop shell from source (Electron):

cd prototypes/control-center/desktop
npm ci && npm start

Command line

The rna command talks to the same service and the same projects as the app.

./rna help                       # everything it can do
./rna config                     # redacted configuration and the model catalog
./rna memory-config --backend embedded
./rna web-config --provider firecrawl --enabled true && ./rna web-test
./rna chat --workspace "$PWD"    # an interactive session in the current folder

Memory, with or without Docker

Rna keeps project memory in one of two ways, chosen in Settings → Memory. They keep separate memories and do not migrate into each other; switching back brings the old memory back.

The built-in engine answers the same requests the host sends an OpenViking server, so recall, the memory tools, the browser and conversation deletion run the same code on either backend. Replayed over 100 real searches, an earlier turn of the same conversation ranked first in 90% of cases and within the top five in 98%; the write-up also says what keyword search cannot do.

Web search: six services, one pair of tools

The agent always sees the same two tools, web_search and web_fetch. Which service answers is a setting.

Services that only search have pages read directly from your machine: anonymous requests to public addresses only, with the connection pinned to the address that was checked, every redirect hop re-checked, and no key sent. Choosing another service switches to that service's address and clears the saved key, so a key is never sent to a service it was not saved for.