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Alvin Bot — a low-poly fox head with glowing eyes

Self-hosted AI agent · Telemetry-free

An AI agent that runs itself.

Lives where you chat. Steer a task mid-run or run it fully offline. Dispatches detached sub-agents — and keeps working while you sleep.

What it is

Not a chatbot. An operator.

Alvin Bot is a personal AI agent you host yourself, built on the official Claude Agent SDK and just as at home on GPT, Gemini, Groq or a local Ollama model. It has a real shell, a real filesystem, and a memory that survives restarts. You talk to it where you already are — Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp and more — and it gets things done in the background, not just in the reply.

  • Lives where you chat — no new app to learn
  • Full shell + filesystem access on its own machine
  • Persistent, layered memory across every session
  • Dispatches its own detached sub-agents for long work
  • Parallel lanes per client or project — isolated memory, per-lane budget caps

Reachable from

TelegramWhatsAppDiscordSlackSignalWebTerminal

Live proof

Real numbers, fetched live.

No screenshots, no marketing math. The numbers below are pulled live server-side from npm, cached briefly, and verifiable by anyone.

Self-hosted · telemetry-free · bring your own key

Capabilities

Built to actually do the work.

Fifteen systems that make autonomy real instead of a demo.

Multi-model engine

Claude, GPT, Gemini, Groq, local models — routed per task, swappable, never locked in.

Local & private

Run it fully offline with a local model (Ollama) — telemetry-free, no API keys, nothing leaves your machine.

Layered memory

Short-term context, durable long-term notes and project files — it remembers what matters.

Learns over time

Curates its persistent memory across sessions, distills lessons from past work, and self-diagnoses its own failures to recover — so it gets sharper the more you use it.

Skill system

Composable skills it loads on demand: research, files, deploys, messaging, and your own.

Detached sub-agents

Spawns isolated workers for long or parallel jobs that survive a parent abort — on Claude or any provider — and reports back when they finish. An agent runs with the same rights as the chat it came from, so it never stalls in front of a prompt nobody is there to answer.

Parallel lanes

Run several separate conversations at once — one client or project per lane, each with its own memory, persona, folder and daily budget cap. Lanes of one workspace share what they learn only when you opt in; isolation is the default.

Live steering

Nudge a running task mid-stream with /btw — it adapts on the fly, no restart — or stop it instantly.

Voice

Speaks and listens — voice notes in, spoken answers out, in multiple languages.

Safe by default

Exec allowlist, DM pairing and locked-down secrets out of the box — and everything it reads (email, web, documents, MCP connectors, uploaded files) is fenced against prompt injection. One switch lifts the command and write guards completely if that is what you want; responsibility is then yours. Who may use the bot at all, and the fence around outside content, stay untouched either way. Documented threat model, audit CLI included.

Runs unattended

Preflight checks, heartbeat monitoring, crash forensics and a self-healing supervisor that escalates to a controlled self-restart when needed — it recovers before you notice. Should the main loop stall anyway, a second thread is watching it and records what it is stuck on while it is still stuck.

Cron & heartbeats

Scheduled jobs and recurring check-ins — it acts on a clock, not only on a prompt. Search the job list and filter it by active, paused, failing, type, model or origin; pause, resume or delete several jobs in one go.

Web interface

The same bot in a browser: every lane side by side, a cron page, workspaces you can create and remove, settings, a system doctor — and short synthetic cues for sent, finished, agent started, error, provider switch, each one switchable on its own. Works on a phone as well as at a desk.

Keeps going when an account runs dry

When a provider hits its quota, the bot recognises it from the limit event, the error or the stated reset time, locks that one account until then, and answers on the next link of your chain. You get one line about it — once, not on every message.

Tools allowed to actually work

Shell and Python run for up to ten minutes, a single call for up to thirty if it asks — enough for a build, an npm install or a data run, not just an ls. Files are read asynchronously, so one blocking access never halts the whole bot.

Changelog

Shipping, in the open.

Every release ships to npm. Want a quiet ping when a new one lands?

Fresh out of the den: Alvin-Bot v5.158.0. Memory that searches by meaning — no Ollama, no key. The short version is below — the full notes are one click away.v5.158.0 →
  1. Alvin Bot now carries its own small multilingual search model, so semantic memory search runs inside the bot — no Ollama, no API key. On a real index of 20,349 sections it put the right source first for 19 of 28 questions. And Ollama may sleep until something actually needs it.

    Full changelog ↗

Release updates

One short email per release. No product pitch, no tracking, unsubscribe in one click.

Double opt-in. You confirm by email; we store only your address for release notices.

Quickstart

Running in 60 seconds.

Brand-new machine? One line installs everything. Already set up? Three commands.

Nothing installed yet — one line does it all
$ curl -fsSL https://unpkg.com/alvin-bot/install.sh | bash

Brings its own Node if you don’t have it. No Homebrew, no Xcode tools, no sudo — then opens the setup wizard.

🪟 On Windows? Run it inside WSL

PowerShell can’t run the line above — its “curl” isn’t real curl and there’s no “bash”. Install WSL first (wsl --install in PowerShell as Admin, then reboot), then in the Ubuntu terminal run the one-liner above, followed by alvin-bot setup and alvin-bot start.

PS> wsl --install
Full Windows guide (incl. 24/7 autostart) →
Or, if you already have Node 18+
  1. Install globally
    $ npm install -g alvin-bot
  2. Pick your AI provider + paste your bot token
    $ alvin-bot setup
  3. It’s alive — message it
    $ alvin-bot start

Who’s behind it

Built by Alev-B.

Alev-B advises on IT delivery and assesses how engineering teams actually ship. Alvin Bot is us practising what we assess — autonomy, in production, on our own infrastructure.

alev-b.com →

An AI agent that runs itself.

© 2026 Alev-B · All rights reserved.

Alvin Bot acts on your behalf — it runs commands, writes files and sends messages under credentials you supply. Use is at your own risk; you are responsible for what it does under your accounts and for any cost it causes. Model output can be wrong.

Proprietary software, not open source. It builds on components owned by others, including Anthropic’s Claude Code and Claude Agent SDK, which are proprietary and governed by Anthropic’s own terms between you and them. Claude, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Telegram, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp and Signal are names of their respective owners, used descriptively. No affiliation or endorsement is claimed.

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