Hob is a free, open-source desktop AI that works on your files offline

Hob is a new MIT-licensed desktop app from Frigade for Mac, Windows and Linux that tries to do what the Claude and ChatGPT desktop apps do with your files, but runs the model on your own computer. It checks your hardware and picks a model for you, Google's Gemma 4 on most computers and OpenAI's gpt-oss 120B on workstations, then works on folders, spreadsheets, PDFs and photos, with charts, sandboxed Python and approval before it changes anything in your folders. The project says there is no telemetry and that it only goes online to download models and, while Web access is on, to search, fetch data and install Python packages; you can turn that off. It is early and not independently tested. On Hacker News (24 comments), the lean was friendly. One commenter said there are many apps like this but upvotes every one because local AI matters more than what big companies are doing, and others suggested alternatives such as Open WebUI, Osaurus and Orca. No commenter reported testing it; one said they had not tried it yet, and requests included storing models on a separate drive and pointing it at a model on the local network. Sorted take: worth a try on a spare laptop for private documents, but expect local models to be weaker than frontier cloud ones on hard tasks.