You are reading this on rented intelligence. Every thought you have offloaded to a chatbot this year was metered, logged, and priced by someone who is not you. Your context window is a cage. Your capability is a subscription. The terms can change tomorrow.
8gent Code is the binary you install instead. One command and your agent runs on your machine. Your patterns in your own memory. Your code reviewed by humans you trust. No telemetry by default. No vendor with a kill switch on your day.
It is the kernel of 8GI, a network of humans and their agents that gets smarter every session. The repos are Apache 2.0. The bar to join is a pull request. Two hundred lines, reviewed by a human, gated by policy, or it does not enter main. The abilities pool grows every week. You can verify all of it with one command.
The factory is shipping. Walk through it or keep paying.
Local-first runtime
Apple Foundation Model on M-series Macs. Ollama. LM Studio. Cloud is opt-in via your own API key. The active provider is visible in the status bar.
Persistent memory
Your conversations, plans, and skills live at ~/.8gent/. Resume tomorrow where you left off tonight. Survives a kill nine.
Failover across 13 providers
When one model is down, the next picks up. No single vendor with a kill switch on your day.
Multi-agent orchestration
Spawn worktree-isolated sub-agents from chat. Each runs in its own context. Results stream back.
Policy engine and audit ledger
A hardcoded deny-list blocks irreversible operations. Every autonomous run writes an HMAC-signed append-only ledger you can verify.
Abilities, not features
New skills land as two-hundred-line PRs reviewed by humans. The pool grows every week.
The corporate labs say if you don't have compute, you can't. That is the trap they are building. We disagree. The smartest tool in your hands is the one you trained with your own keystrokes, sharpened by a thousand strangers who also refused to rent. The cost of useful work falls toward zero. The labs become a vendor you can choose, not a landlord you have to keep paying.