TL;DR: Meet CODEC—a completely open-source tool that transforms any LLM into a personal computer agent. You can command it via text or voice to look at your screen, type, manage your apps, run commands, and even code its own plugins. Also new: you can now control everything remotely from your phone using a Cloudflare tunnel. It’s 100% local and free—no cloud, no subscriptions, and zero data leaving your hardware.
I’ll cut right to the chase because the actual use cases are what matter here.
Imagine just saying, "Hey Q, open Chrome and search for Tokyo flights next Monday," and watching your browser do exactly that. (I use "Q" as a shortcut for Qwen, running locally on my Mac Studio 35b a3b MLX).
💬 It reads your screen and types for you: If you say "draft a reply saying I'll look at it tonight," it looks at your screen, reads the active Slack or email, writes a polished response, and pastes it into the chat box.
👁️ It has full vision and voice: You can ask what's on your monitor, and it uses a vision model to describe it. Ask for a Japanese translation, and it speaks it back.
🎵 It controls your system: Tell it to remind you about a PR at 3 PM, and it makes an Apple Reminder. Tell it to play Spotify, skip tracks, or adjust volume, and it handles it natively.
🐍 It writes its own code: If I say "create a skill to check my Proxmox node," it writes a Python plugin, saves it, and runs it instantly without needing a reboot.
All of this runs entirely privately and for free, triggered by voice, keyboard, or a wake word.
🌍 But the remote features are next level: Let's say I'm at a restaurant. I can pull up codec.mydomain.com on my phone (secured via Cloudflare Zero Trust) and type "check the backup script." My Mac runs it and sends the results—no SSH or VPN needed.
🛠️ Setting up the phone dashboard is also insanely simple. It's just two Python files: a FastAPI backend and a vanilla HTML front end. There's no React, no npm installs, and no build steps. You just clone the repo, run python3 codec_dashboard.py, point a Cloudflare Tunnel at port 8090, and add Zero Trust email auth. Boom. Your phone is securely talking to your machine through your own domain.
🔒 What I love most is the privacy. You aren't relying on Telegram to relay system commands through their servers. You aren't giving a Discord bot access to your local files, or letting a WhatsApp API scrape your AI conversations. It is completely direct, encrypted, and yours.
🛡️ Of course, giving an AI control of your OS sounds sketchy, which is why the security is baked right in. There's a dangerous command blocker that catches over 20 red-flag patterns (like sudo, rm -rf, or killall) and hits you with a Y/N prompt before anything actually runs. Everything the agent does is timestamped in a local ~/.codec/audit.log. You can even use a "dry-run" mode to safely preview actions without executing them. Oh, and the wake word detection has noise filtering, so a movie playing in the background won't accidentally trigger a random command.
⚡ Zero-latency skills: > Because speed is everything, CODEC has 15 built-in skills that fire instantly without even waking up the LLM. Things like the calculator, weather, system info, web search, timers with voice alerts, Spotify, Apple Notes, and even the self-writing skill creator run completely locally and instantaneously.
🧠 It works with anything: > You're not locked into a specific ecosystem. It works with Ollama, LM Studio, MLX (which absolutely flies on Apple Silicon), OpenAI, Anthropic, the Gemini free tier, or literally any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. For voice, it uses Whisper for speech-to-text, and Kokoro 82M for text-to-speech. Kokoro is ridiculously fast on M-series chips and gives you a rock-solid, consistent voice every single time.
💻 Multi-machine setups are a breeze: > Say you run a heavy model like Qwen 3.5 35B on your Mac Studio. You can use your MacBook Air as a lightweight "thin client" over your LAN. The Air doesn't need any models installed on it—it just beams your voice to the Studio's Whisper, gets the LLM's answer, and plays back the audio from Kokoro.
🐍 Built for builders: > Under the hood, the entire architecture is Python. Two files for the agent, two for the phone dashboard, a Whisper server, a skills folder, and a config file. A setup wizard handles the rest.
Honestly, this is it. This is the AI operating system I actually wanted to use. I've spent the last year studying and building with AI full-time, and poured the last 10 intense days into making CODEC a reality. Because it has this much root-level system access, I knew it had to be completely open-source.
I want you guys to save it, star it, clone it, tear it apart, and tell me what I missed!
git clone https://github.com/AVADSA25/codec
cd codec
pip3 install pynput sounddevice soundfile numpy requests simple-term-menu
brew install sox
python3 setup_codec.py
python3 codec.py
Mickaël Farina — AVA Digital
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