Project status

Read this first. It is the morning briefing for hearth.

Current release: v1.5.0 (Governor). The stack runs on real hardware. Local model quality is the honest ceiling; everything below is built and shipped unless this page says otherwise. For what comes next, see the Roadmap.

What was built

A declarative NixOS system for hearth, a security-first host for local LLMs and sandboxed agents. The repo has a working flake.nix (nixpkgs unstable, nixos-generators, sops-nix, home-manager), the NixOS modules (base, llm, agents, sandbox, observability, networking, shell, mcp, egress, tripwire), a concrete workstation host profile, the agent runtime, build/deploy/bootstrap scripts, a GitHub Actions flake-check workflow, and the full docs.

The shipped capability set at v1.5:

Sandboxed agents as ephemeral systemd units (no writes outside their workspace, no host secrets, no privilege escalation), with permission modes (plan / auto / bypass), an approvals queue, and a kill switch.
Every run audited to local SQLite (tokens, cost, latency, errors), plus a live cloud-cost-saved counter.
Reproducible whole-OS flake with atomic, bootloader-level rollback.
OpenAI-compatible API, a knowledge base (RAG) with semantic retrieval, a standing-missions scheduler, and a human-gated self-improvement loop.
Per-run containment: capability manifests (tool allowlists) and egress allowlists you declare at launch. See Per-run containment.
Honeyfile tripwires that catch a run reaching for planted credentials (v1.2).
The flight recorder and replay viewer (v1.3): every run records a structured per-step event stream, and a scrubber replays it step by step. Plus run diff (v1.3), a side-by-side prompt comparison across two local models. See Replay.
OS-level egress enforcement (v1.4): declared hosts are enforced with per-run nftables rules at the kernel, not just in the web tools.
The governor (v1.5): a spend circuit breaker (a hard daily token cap), unified alerting to Telegram and ntfy, and declarative cron-as-flake missions. See The governor.

Decisions made (the three non-obvious ones)

NixOS flake over bootc (OCI images). Reproducibility and atomic, bootloader level rollback won. bootc stays a documented pivot. See Decision records ADR-002.
sops-nix over agenix for secrets. sops-nix supports age, PGP, and KMS keys and has broader adoption; agenix is age-only. See Decision records ADR-003.
Textual (Python) for the boot dashboard, not bubbletea (Go). Python is already in the agent runtime, so no new language toolchain.

What needs your input, and what is still roadmap

Be aware before you rely on anything here:

sops-nix key setup is not done for you. You must run age-keygen -o ~/.config/sops/age/keys.txt, put the public key in a .sops.yaml creation rule, and create real secrets. The repo only ships a placeholder at /etc/hearth/sops.yaml. Walkthrough in Decision records ADR-003.
OS-level egress enforcement is off by default. It goes up only when you set hearth.egress.enable = true and a run declares allowed_hosts; the tool layer enforces regardless. See Per-run containment.
GPU passthrough requires Proxmox-side setup. The GPU must be passed through to the VM over PCIe before CUDA works. See https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough
Some layers are deliberately roadmap, not shipped: kernel-level auditd watch rules for raw-open tripwire detection and signed export of replay recordings both land in v2.0. See the Roadmap for the full list.

Where to run things

The nix commands run on a Mac or a NixOS VM, not on Windows. Windows has no nix. Use the Windows checkout for editing and git only; do the actual evaluation and image build on the Mac or a NixOS host.

# On your Mac / NixOS machine (not Windows):
nix flake check
bash scripts/build-image.sh

For the full operational sequence, see the Runbook.

GitHub

The repo lives at https://github.com/EricFinland/hearth.