Show HN: Axiom – Open-source AI research agent that runs locally (C#, Ollama)

1 point

4 months ago

I built an autonomous research agent in C# that runs entirely on local LLMs via Ollama.

Give it a topic and it: generates diverse search queries, searches the web (Brave Search API, free tier), fetches and reads relevant sources, analyzes each source for key findings, and synthesizes a structured markdown report with citations.

Everything runs locally — no OpenAI/Anthropic API needed. Just Ollama + llama3.1:8b.

It takes about 15 minutes per research run on a mid-range CPU (Ryzen 5 5500, no GPU needed). Not fast, but it does the research while you do other things.

Tech stack: C#/.NET 8, Ollama, SQLite for semantic memory, Brave Search API.

Why C# instead of Python? Because .NET developers want AI tools too, and the ecosystem is underserved compared to LangChain/LlamaIndex.

Known limitations: CPU inference is slow (~15min/run), 8B models occasionally produce malformed tool calls (handled with retries), and research quality depends on Brave Search results for your topic.

I also made a starter kit if you want to build your own agent from scratch: https://github.com/DynamicCSharp/agentkit