A personal iMessage assistant that can use a browser like you.
It can do your chores, book you movie tickets, or handle your groceries. You stay in control of your passwords, credit cards and context.
It's Open Source, self-hostable, and can use any model. One-click deploy to Vercel and get rolling.
Personal agents are much more useful when they can sign in, book, buy and act on your behalf. But your accounts, your passwords, are the keys to your digital kingdom. OpenInstinct runs in your own Vercel account. Secrets are encrypted before they touch your database and models never see them. Verify yourself by reading the code!
The deploy flow provisions everything: Kernel for cloud browsers, Neon for Postgres, Linq for the iMessage line, and Vercel AI Gateway for inference. Usage is billed to your Vercel account. Set the remaining auth variables on the deployment:
BETTER_AUTH_SECRET="$(openssl rand -base64 32)"
BETTER_AUTH_URL=https://your-host
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@host/database
DATABASE_URL_UNPOOLED=postgresql://user:password@host/database
SECRET_ENCRYPTION_KEY="$(openssl rand -base64 32)"The application database schema and versioned migrations live in db/. The
Drizzle application store uses DATABASE_URL for runtime queries; its migration
commands require the direct DATABASE_URL_UNPOOLED connection. Run
pnpm db:migrate before starting against a new or upgraded local database.
Vercel uses Turbo to run the uncached migration task before its application
build. See db/README.md for existing-database adoption,
environment loading, and constraint-validation sequencing. Better Auth retains
its separate migration path.
Treat SECRET_ENCRYPTION_KEY as production key material — back it up
separately; rotating it requires re-encrypting existing values.
Configure the variables in .env.example, then:
git clone https://github.com/Merit-Systems/open-instinct.git
cd open-instinct
pnpm install
pnpm devLocal development uses the same Postgres, vault, Kernel browser, and AI Gateway path as the Vercel deployment — there is no separate local-only runtime.
Warning
This is not software intended for production use.