What Virtues is

Virtues is a server that holds the data of your life — messages, calendar, health, location, transactions, recordings, files — on a machine you own, and the software that turns that pile into something readable: a record of your days, articles about the people and places in them, and an AI that reasons from your actual life rather than a generic profile.

You can run Virtues on your own Linux machine today. Purpose-built hardware is optional and coming soon.

Where data lives vs. where it is processed

Your data lives on your hardware and reasoning happens in the cloud. Virtues stores your database, records, embeddings, and reranking models locally on your disk. However, local hardware rarely has the capacity to run frontier reasoning models.

When Virtues performs external reasoning requests (such as composing an account of your day, transcribing audio, or answering user queries), the necessary context passes through our gateway to curated model providers via explicit zero-data-retention pipelines. We meter what a request costs for billing, but we never keep what was in it.

You can bring your own API keys. If you prefer, Virtues can route requests through any OpenAI-compatible endpoint or personal provider account instead. In that scenario, request payloads bypass our gateway entirely, and data retention is governed by your direct terms with that provider.

Virtues has no administrative access to your server. Devices authenticate against an authorization list maintained entirely by your local instance. We aren’t on that list. We maintain no backdoors and open no inbound ports. Reaching your server details the exact network paths and specifies what our relay can and cannot see.

Where to start

If we built your hardware, inference and install are already done. Your next step is to pair your phone or laptop: Reaching your server.

If you’re setting up your own Linux machine, three steps:

1. Check what to run it on: minimum specs and a supported OS.
2. Set up inference the embedding and reranking models that search your record. Do it before you install, because the installer asks for their URLs.
3. Run the installer: one command, about ten minutes.

Then pair your phone or laptop: Reaching your server.

Once you’re up and running, four pages cover day-to-day operation: Upgrading, Backup & restore (read it before you need it, since the server cannot decrypt its own archives), When something breaks, and The CLI.

The Glossary defines the words this system uses, which is worth ten minutes if the vocabulary feels invented. It partly is.

What’s here, and what isn’t

These docs are written alongside the software and describe what actually ships. Pages marked soon in the sidebar are planned. Nothing published here is aspirational — if a page says the server does something, it does.

Every page here is also plain markdown: append .md to any docs URL to get the source, and /llms.txt indexes them all for anything reading on your behalf. The manual is versioned with the software it describes — this site publishes from the released branch, so what you read is what a server actually runs.

The engineering record behind all of this — design decisions, audits, measured findings — lives in the repository rather than here. It is written for the people and agents building Virtues, and it reads that way.

The Library holds the essays — what we think this is for. That’s the other register entirely.