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What is arden?

arden gives you a local AI assistant that actually remembers. It connects to your email, calendar, Slack, web, MCP tools, local files, shell, and long-term memory — then keeps the useful parts available across sessions. It isn’t a coding agent. Its home surface is Areas: your life domains (apartment hunt, health, a side project) mapped to memory pages, each watched by a standing agent that compresses its domain into at most one ask. See the Areas guide. Unlike stateless chat interfaces, arden:
  • Focuses by watching each life domain and surfacing only the one thing that needs you
  • Remembers conversations, commitments, and preferences across sessions, synthesized into readable topic pages
  • Acts autonomously via scheduled automations, standing area agents, background agents, and multi-agent workflows
  • Returns structured results: agent runs can produce validated objects, not just prose
  • Shows its work with streaming traces, approval cards, and tool/run lifecycle events
  • Renders rich output through sandboxed HTML widgets for charts, tables, forms, and visualizations
  • Integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, web search, MCP tools, local files, and notifications
  • Keeps context lean by loading infrequent tool schemas only when needed
  • Runs locally — the server and clients run on your machine

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Architecture

Arden is split into two main surfaces:
  • Server — Python/FastAPI backend that runs the agent loop, manages memory, exposes HTTP/SSE APIs, and connects to LLM/tool providers
  • Desktop — Electron client for chat, settings, memory inspection, automations, approvals, traces, and HTML widgets

Quickstart

Install and run arden locally.

Concepts

How facts, wiki pages, areas, automations, and agents fit together.

Areas

Life domains, standing agents, and the focus set on Home.

Desktop Guide

Connect the app and use the main UI surfaces.

Memory

How persistent memory, topic pages, and recall work.

HTML Widgets

Render rich interactive cards from agent tools.

Automations

Schedule tasks that run autonomously.

Workflows

Subagents, multi-agent presets, and the five spawn surfaces.

API Reference

HTTP API for building on top of arden.