Rowboat: Open-source, local-first AI work app built as alternative to Claude Desktop

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Rowboat Labs has released Rowboat, a free, open-source desktop productivity application designed to go beyond chat-based AI assistants like Claude Desktop. The app integrates dedicated work surfaces for email, meeting notes, a sandboxed browser, parallel coding, and Obsidian-style note-taking, allowing an AI assistant to operate within actual workflows. All user data is stored locally as plain Markdown files, and the tool is licensed under Apache 2.0, supporting any LLM including local models via Ollama or LM Studio. Rowboat also builds a knowledge graph from a user's work activity to provide richer context across all its features. Users can additionally create and publish custom web-app work surfaces with their own UI and background agents using Rowboat's tooling.

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