Show HN: Calliope AI – Free AI IDE and AI Data Lab BYOK

3 points

5 months ago

We built two desktop apps for developers and data scientists who want AI assistance without subscription lock-in or API proxying, or to run against local models.

  - Calliope AI IDE: VSCode-based, full dev environment with AI chat, live coding, and autonomous agents
  - Calliope AI Lab: JupyterLab under the hood, with built-in AI chat and local Postgres

Both free. No account. No login. BYOK (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, Ollama).

How it's different from Cursor/Continue/Windsurf/Antigravity: Your API keys stay local. Requests go direct to providers – we don't route through our servers, don't see your prompts, don't mark up API costs, we don't train on your data.

The agents can search the web, write code, manage git, scaffold projects, and run iteratively until completion criteria are met. Not autocomplete – actual background task runners on your machine, not some hosted service.

Offline works too. Pair with Ollama for fully airgapped operation.

Business model: Desktop apps are free. We make money from our hosted cloud platform for teams that want collaboration, SSO, managed infrastructure, and AI for secure environments.

  builds for macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Windows (64-bit), Linux (64-bit/deb/rpm/AppImage) - unsigned 

  Download: https://calliope.ai/download
  Issues: https://github.com/calliopeai/calliope-ai-desktop-releases/issues

Give it a spin, file bugs. Fresh release – expect rough edges. Feedback welcome, patience appreciated.

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