Sjel

One household's people, places, trips, money, home and calendar, on devices the household owns, with one assistant that works on that data.

 

_{Screenshots: the travel hub in the live demo, synthetic data.}

Live demo · Try it · How it works · Measured · Research · Open work

What it is

Sjel stores the facts of one person's or one household's life as typed data: people, places, trips, money, home and calendar. The data stays on hardware the household controls. Screens show that data, and an assistant works on it.

Sjel has a small core and optional extensions. All extensions live in this repository. Each installation switches on the extensions it needs.

Two surfaces: calm on the glass, open in the terminal

Sjel is designed with two deliberate surfaces:

1. On the glass: Apple-like simplicity for daily life. Guided device pairing via QR code, one-tap local intelligence tuning that auto-detects hardware and quantizations, and zero terminal friction for household members. It just works.
2. Under the hood: A completely open, scriptable node. Every capability serves a live route manifest (GET /routes), speaks typed JSON over loopback HTTP, and stores state in queryable SQLite files. Developers and operators can drive every workflow from the terminal (sjel, sjel capability call), plug in local models, or automate tasks via standard UNIX tools without touching the browser.

How it works

flowchart LR
  phone["iPhone app<br/>offline copy"] -- "signed requests<br/>same Wi-Fi · Tailscale · own server" --> node
  web["Web browser"] --> node
  subgraph node["Node: a Mac or Linux machine"]
    core["Core<br/>entities · devices · data classes · pseudonymizer"]
    ext["Extensions<br/>travel · money · people · home · calendar"]
  end
  node -- "device model → Mac model → fixed rules" --> models["Models"]

Loading

1. One node, a Mac or a Linux machine, holds the data and accepts every write. Other devices send changes to it. A phone edit made on an old copy is refused, and the phone shows both versions.
2. A phone pairs once. It signs every request with its own key, whichever connection it uses.
3. Every value has a data class: Public, Mine, Others (facts about other people) or Secret. A class goes up by itself. Only a person, with a written reason, can lower it.
4. Data about other people never reaches a cloud model (libs/content-item, cloud_admission).
5. Home shows only what still waits for a decision.

Design rule: clever inside, easy outside

The goal is a system that is easy to use and easy to maintain. The design underneath may be smart. Using and maintaining it may not require that smartness.

• One way in. A capability is not finished until sjel can find it, check its health and call it (sjel capability list, sjel capability call).
• One place per kind of fact. Public code and doctrine live here. Private values and machine state live in the overlay. A secret lives in the user's own secret store (the macOS Keychain on a Mac), and everything else holds a reference to it.
• No setup step that only its author remembers. If a step must be done by hand, a tool does it (tools/setup-secret.sh) and tools/doctor reports it when it is missing.

State

Feature	State
Typed people, places, trips, money, home and calendar, with a source on every value	Built
iPhone app with an offline copy, paired by device key	Built
Same Wi-Fi, Tailscale and own-server connections	Built
Pseudonymizer in front of cloud model calls, for the owner's own data	Built, one caller (comms)
Data about other people sent to a cloud model pseudonymized, or synced end-to-end encrypted	Target
Model selection: dual-mechanism — device model or local decision engine, with zero-fail heuristic fallback	Built
Assistant that proposes actions and asks before anything that leaves Sjel or cannot be undone	Target. Today it routes by keyword.
Mac app	Target
iCloud connection, encrypted by Sjel	Target

Try it

The live demo runs the web interface on synthetic data. No install needed.

To run your own node:

git clone https://github.com/larsboes/Sjel.git
cd Sjel
tools/install.sh
tools/doctor

You get the web interface at http://localhost:8082 and the sjel command. The installer asks where to keep your private settings, which live outside this repository. macOS and Linux. Start here covers the details.

Measured

Each number names the command that reproduces it.

What	Result	Reproduce
Pseudonymizer recall, reversible path	48/48 (100.0%), gate ≥ 91.7%, measured 2026-09-27	cargo run -p comms --bin comms-redaction-eval -- --pseudonymized <corpus>
Redaction recall, destructive path	48/48 (100.0%), gate ≥ 91.7%, measured 2026-09-27	the same command without --pseudonymized
Feed ranking (bge-m3)	0.941 pairwise, 0.994 mean nDCG, 6/6 useful top-1	bun capabilities/comms/eval/run-relevance.ts, result in capabilities/comms/eval/results/2026-08-30-bge-m3-ollama.md
Tests	829 TypeScript tests and 107 Rust test binaries, CI green	sjel test and cargo test --workspace

The redaction corpus (24 fixtures) lives in the private settings, so its two rows cannot be re-run from a public clone. The relevance corpus is public (capabilities/comms/eval/relevance-corpus.json) and needs a local bge-m3. Offline use and pairing time are not measured yet.

Structure

An extension is a directory under capabilities/ with a service.toml. sjel capability list shows the ones on this machine.

Part	Contents
Core	capabilities/entities, capabilities/devices, libs/content-item, libs/pseudonymize, libs/sjel-server, dashboard/src/lib/intelligence
Travel	trips, transit, traveler, scouting, punctuality, sparpreis-watch (Deutsche Bahn fare alerts)
People	entities-sync, entities-google-sync, places, people-registry
Money	finance, finance-prices
Home	interior, home-assistant, soundscape, printing
Time and knowledge	calendar, comms, knowledge-base, knowledge-graph, vault
Machines	host-patch, host-watch, host-net, macmon, backup, container-refresh
Interfaces	dashboard (web and iPhone), sjel-status (the node's web server)

Scope

• Sjel does not ask for passwords or MFA codes of other services.
• Only first-party extensions run. There is no extension store.
• Prose stays in Obsidian. Sjel stores the structured facts and links to the notes.
• Supported platforms: macOS, Linux and iOS.

Research

research/ collects the studies and benchmarks behind the project, including the ones that argue against it.

License

AGPL-3.0-only (LICENSE), from 2026-09-26. Earlier releases are MIT. Contributions carry a DCO sign-off (CONTRIBUTING.md).