wtf is brigade?

Brigade is a self-hosted crew of AI agents that you run on your own machine or server, meant to act as a kind of personal intelligence you fully control. Instead of one chatbot, you get multiple agents with their own workspaces and credentials that share a long-term memory system called Tideline, so something one agent learns can be used by the others. Agents can delegate tasks to each other, switch between different AI models mid-task without losing context, and connect into the apps and services you already use. You install it with a single terminal command on macOS or Linux, and it starts as a fast chat interface in your terminal. From there you can build out isolated agents with their own personas, a skill system, a scheduler for recurring jobs, sub-agents that fan out work, and an org chart structure that decides which agents can talk to which. Everything is stored under a single folder on your machine, and deleting that folder removes everything Brigade has stored. You are not locked into one AI provider. Brigade supports Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Groq, Cerebras, xAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, and local models through Ollama, or any compatible endpoint, and you can switch models during a conversation. It can run as an always-on background service with a crash supervisor and scheduled jobs, and you can reach your crew of agents not just from the terminal but from WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, iMessage, and other messaging channels. It also connects to over a thousand external apps like Gmail, Notion, and GitHub through a built in tool, and it can read documents like PDFs, Word, and Excel files and also create or edit them. For storage, Brigade defaults to a simple filesystem setup, but it can optionally use a self-hosted database called Convex with encryption at rest. Your API keys and data are meant to stay on your own machine rather than being sent to a third party, and there is no telemetry. The project is released under the MIT license. The full README is longer than what was shown.