free · pay what you want · on itch.io

Your AI agent OS.
Local. Private. Yours.

NovaClaw turns your own machine and your own models into a friendly AI workspace — an operating system for AI agents that plans, verifies, and repairs itself. No cloud accounts. No subscriptions. Your chats, code, and knowledge never leave home.

Latest builds, supported platforms and release notes live on itch.io

NovaClaw's home screen: a tile launcher with Chats, Notes, Calendar, Recipes, Files, Search, Terminal, Trash, Settings and more, above a bar that starts a new agent.
NovaClaw — home is an app launcher, not a wall of text.

What makes it NovaClaw

🔒 Private by architecture

Your data plane — chats, code, knowledge — never egresses. Run it on a LAN, run it airgapped: NovaClaw is built to work with the cable unplugged, not just promise it in a policy page.

🏠 Local models first

Point it at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint — vLLM, llama.cpp, LM Studio, Ollama. A deterministic harness supplies planning, per-step verification, and tool-call tolerance, so small open-weight models finish jobs usually thrown at frontier APIs.

🧵 An OS, not a chatbot

Agent sessions are processes: they spawn sub-agents, exit with results a parent can join, inherit configuration, and show up in a task manager you can suspend, resume, or kill. Home is an app launcher, not a wall of text.

🛡 It never breaks in your hands

A crashed server restarts itself and the UI reconnects — a calm message, never a stack trace. Every operational setting is runtime-editable, so a working agent can repair its own instance.

🌐 Every instance is a node

Run headless on the box with the GPU, drive it from the desktop app on your laptop — URL + token and you're in. Instances discover each other on the LAN, and agents can call each other across machines.

✨ For humans, not just hackers

Power should be legible and beautiful to a normal person. NovaClaw teaches as it works — it self-documents, meets you at your level, and never asks you to learn a terminal to use fire.

Why NovaClaw?

We respect the open agent tools — but most of them are built by terminal people, for terminal people, with cloud APIs as the default assumption. NovaClaw makes different choices:

NovaClawTypical agent tools
Getting started Unpack a zip, double-click. Done. Install Node/npm toolchains, edit config files, export API keys
Interface Friendly desktop app + web UI Terminal-first, built for developers
Local models The design target — built and tested against small local models Cloud frontier APIs first; local is a config option
Your data Stays on your machine; fully airgappable Defaults wired to third-party clouds
Bloat No ads, no accounts, no upsells, no telemetry of your content Bundled cloud services, accounts, npm dependency sprawl
Sessions as OS processes ✓ spawn · wait · task manager
Self-healing instances ✓ auto-restart, agent-repairable config

Download

Get NovaClaw

Current downloads · supported platforms · release notes

Open NovaClaw on itch.io

itch.io is NovaClaw's release home. It always carries the current builds and the version-specific instructions, so this page never sends you toward an old download.

Free, pay what you want. itch.io shows the file details before you download.

Source code

Full application source · read it, audit it, build it

Browse on GitHub

The complete source of the app. Build with Bun 1.3.14 + Node 24 — instructions in README.md. Author: Nancy Sadkov. Clone it, or grab a zip straight from GitHub → Code → Download ZIP.

Published as a snapshot of each release, without development history.

NovaClaw is free to use, modify and redistribute under the Functional Source License 1.1 — the one restriction is that you may not resell it as a competing product or service. Every release additionally becomes Apache 2.0 two years after it ships. The name and logo are not licensed with the code. See itch.io for current platform support and release-specific notes.

Community & support

A Discord server and a subreddit for tech support are being set up — links will appear here shortly. Until then: the source archive ships with the docs.