What the name means
Two thousand years ago, every Roman house kept a lararium: a shrine by the door, holding the family's penates, the spirits that guarded its home, its memory, and its continuities. When Troy burned, Aeneas's hands were too new from slaughter to touch the gods, so old Anchises held the penates fast and rode out through the flames on his son's shoulders. A home is where its penates are.
Your digital life wants the same thing now: one place holding your agent's memory, its credentials, its voice and habits, readable and movable by you alone. The commercial clouds are burning. Carry yours out.
At home. And in your pocket.
The hearth burns on your own hardware: a box under the stairs, a NAS, a used mini-PC. You don't live there, so Lararium comes to wherever you are, as a tap from your home screen, a thread in WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal, or plain SMS when that's all there is.
The same agent, the same memory, from any device. Ask it something on your phone at the store and the answer is waiting in the same conversation at your desk. When it needs your permission to spend, send, or delete, the approval card lands on the screen you're holding. The Android app goes further, opening your phone's own contacts, calls, and texts, one gated door at a time.
The covenant
- Your fire
- Point it at your own llama.cpp, Ollama, or vLLM box, or bring an API key for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or OpenRouter. No lock-in, and nothing rerouted without your config saying so.
- Your memory
- Everything your agent knows lives in plain files on your disk. The conversation window is scratch paper; the files are the record. One tar exports your agent's whole life.
- Your keys
- Credentials sit in a vault, and the agent never sees them. The network layer swaps real values in on the way out, after policy. Prompt injection can't steal what was never handed over.
- Your doors
- Mail, calendar, messages, browser, shell, and any API you hand it: each door gets its own rule, open, knock first, or sealed. Every action lands in a log only you can read.
- Always lit
- Morning briefings, price watches, inbox triage, scheduled chores, goals that run for days. Quiet hours and a noise budget keep it a servant, not a spammer.
How it works
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i
One daemon, your machine
A single service runs the show: sessions, model calls, tools, schedules. Each session is an append-only event log on your disk, so history can be replayed, rewound, and audited.
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ii
Bring your own model
A router sits between the agent and whatever model you choose, local or cloud. You can set a cheap model for chat, a stronger one for agentic work, and a local one for private turns.
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iii
Work happens in a cell
Commands, code, and browsing run inside a cell: a real Linux container fenced by user namespaces and kernel cgroup quotas. Root inside the cell unlocks nothing outside it.
The filesystem is an overlay on a sealed template. Snapshot takes a second; rewinding takes a second, even after the agent made a mess of things.
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iv
No doors without a key
A cell gets no route to the internet by default. The one exit runs through a proxy that drops anything policy has not allowed, and the policy is yours: open, knock first, or sealed.
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v
Keys outside its hands
The vault holds your credentials encrypted. The agent gets a placeholder; the real value goes in only at the network boundary, only after policy. Anything that spends, sends, or deletes waits for your tap, and every call lands in an append-only log.
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vi
Memory is files
A summary index plus your full session history, written in open formats you can edit by hand. When the working window grows long it gets compacted, and the files keep the record.
curl -fsSL get.lararium.io | sh
or run the stack with Docker Compose. Any Linux box will do.
The shrine keeps the penates. Lararium keeps your agent.
One email when we launch. No newsletters, no noise.