Brigade: Your AI Team, Running on Your Machine
Brigade puts a crew of AI agents on your computer — they browse, write emails, attend meetings, and message you like a colleague would.
A team that lives on your computer
Imagine you could message a colleague on WhatsApp and say "book me a demo with that agency, check if the invoice from March is still unpaid, and send a follow-up to the leads from last week" — and someone just did it.
That's roughly what Brigade is. It's a system you install on your own computer or server that runs a small crew of AI workers. Each one has a specialty. Together, they share memory, pass tasks to each other, and actually do things: browse websites, type, click, read emails, join meetings.
You reach them through apps you already use — WhatsApp, Slack, iMessage. No new dashboard to learn.
What's notable is that nothing goes to a cloud you don't control. Your conversations, your files, your data — it all stays on your machine. That matters if you're in a field where client confidentiality isn't optional.
There's also a clever piece inside called Headroom that keeps the AI from reading through your entire history every single time it answers you. That keeps running costs low — up to 95% lower on certain tasks, they say.
It's early, a bit rough around the edges, and you'll need someone technical to set it up. But as a glimpse of what a personal AI team looks like when it's truly yours — it's worth knowing about.
Words worth knowing
AI agent — an AI that doesn't just answer questions but takes actions: clicking, searching, sending messages on your behalf.
Self-hosted — software you run on your own computer or server, rather than a company's cloud. You own the data.
Token — roughly one word or part of a word that an AI processes. More tokens = more cost. Headroom reduces how many tokens Brigade needs to use.
Context — everything the AI "remembers" within a conversation. The bigger the context, the more it can keep track of — and the more expensive it gets.
If you already feel stretched thin across WhatsApp, email, and your calendar — it's worth imagining what it would mean to have a small team handling the coordination layer for you, quietly, on your own terms.
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