What is Life?
Life (styled "life" in its README) is a self-hosted team of AI agents built on Claude Code, published by Matt Abate under the MIT licence. The README describes it as a small company that works for you: a chief of staff runs the day and hires the rest of the team, such as a coach or a trip planner, as your goals call for them. Each agent is a long-running Claude Code session with a standing role and full memory, and work nobody owns goes to the chief of staff.
The agents run on a Mac you own, such as a Mac mini or a laptop that stays on, with macOS 15 or later. The hub, written mainly in Go, listens only on a private Tailscale network, so it has no open ports and no public URL. You manage it from an iPhone app with push cards and approvals, a desktop app and a web console. Sessions, Recs, Calendar and Configuration pages ship by default, and the agents build new pages, data sources and automations in your own private copy of the code.
Installation is one prompt pasted into Claude Code, which then follows the repository's SETUP.md. Setup takes about 2 hours, most of it waiting on Apple and the Xcode download. The software is free, but it needs a Claude Pro or Max subscription ($20, $100 or $200 a month), an Apple Developer membership ($99 a year) for the iPhone and desktop apps, and Backblaze B2 storage at cents a month for nightly encrypted backups. The repository was created in September 2026.
Life screenshots
Explore the interface. Open a screenshot to view it at full size.
Source: official Life project page.
Key capabilities
- Agent team with roles Each agent is a long-running Claude Code session with a standing role, and anything nobody owns goes to the chief of staff.
- iPhone, desktop and web apps Sessions, Recs, Calendar and Configuration pages, with the web console usable from any browser on your Tailscale network.
- Approval gate Money, deleting, contacting people, sharing data and pushing code wait for your approval with a decider code only you hold.
- Phone cards The agent puts a card on your phone when it needs a decision and handles the rest itself.
- Goal tracking Sessions file what they learn under each goal, so every goal has a current status.
- Recommendation ledger Every suggestion is logged with its evidence and price, so you can check later whether it worked.
- Voice input Speak into the box you are in, and speech is turned into text on the Mac itself.
Where Life fits
- Private networking The hub listens only on Tailscale, with no open ports and no public URL.
- Limited outbound traffic Connections go to Anthropic for Claude sessions, Apple for push notifications, your own backup bucket and an optional PostHog heartbeat that stays off unless you say yes.
- Encrypted backups Nightly backups are encrypted on the Mac before upload to storage you own, and setup tests them with a real restore.
- Self-modifying app Ask for a new data source, page or automation and the agent builds it in your own copy of the code.
- Weekly addenda Upstream fixes land in ADDENDA.md, your agent shows each new entry as a card every Monday, and nothing from the repository lands in your copy without your yes.
- Mac hub tooling Setup installs Go, tmux, restic, xcodegen, node, gh and sqlite with Homebrew, and the hub runs under launchd.
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