Top AI Product

There’s been a growing frustration with AI assistants that want to slurp up all your data and send it off to some server you’ll never see. That’s what makes [Rowboat](https://www.rowboatlabs.com/) so interesting — it’s an open-source AI coworker that runs locally on your machine, and it just picked up over 2,500 GitHub stars in a single week. Clearly, people are paying attention.

So what does it actually do? [Rowboat](https://github.com/rowboatlabs/rowboat) hooks into your Gmail and meeting transcription tools, then builds a persistent knowledge graph from all of that context. Think of it as a coworker who actually remembers what happened in last Tuesday’s standup and can pull up the relevant email thread when you’re prepping for a follow-up. It handles meeting briefs, email drafts, slide decks, and document generation — the kind of grunt work that eats up half your morning.

What really sets it apart is how it stores everything. Your data lives as plain Markdown files with backlinks in an Obsidian-compatible vault at `~/.rowboat/`. You can open those files, read them, edit them, or move them wherever you want. There’s no proprietary database locking you in. If you already use Obsidian for note-taking, this fits right into your workflow. The team also built in MCP (Model Context Protocol) support, so you can plug in external tools like CRMs, databases, or your own custom integrations.

Rowboat is [backed by Y Combinator](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/rowboat-labs), which gives it some credibility beyond just being another weekend side project. The [Hacker News discussion](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962641) around its launch was mostly positive — people liked the local-first approach, though some raised fair questions about shell access security and how the knowledge graph handles noisy data. The founders were responsive, which is always a good sign for an open-source project.

If you’re tired of AI tools that treat your work emails as training data, Rowboat is worth a look. It’s not perfect yet — IMAP support and non-Google integrations are still on the roadmap — but the core idea of a private, local-first AI coworker with transparent memory is exactly what a lot of people have been asking for.