LobsterAI: A Free, All‑in‑One AI Personal Assistant

LobsterAI (GitHub: netease-youdao/LobsterAI) is an open‑source project that turns your desktop into a 24/7 intelligence hub. Built with Electron, React, TypeScript and the Anthropic Claude Agent SDK, it can:

• Generate documents – Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PDF, and video.
• Search the web and pull facts in real time.
• Automate browsers with Playwright.
• Run tasks locally or inside a safe Alpine Linux sandbox.
• Schedule recurring workflows via cron syntax.
• Remotely trigger work from your phone through Telegram, Discord, DingTalk, Feishu or NetEase IM.

Below is a comprehensive walkthrough of LobsterAI’s architecture, how to install it, build installers, and extend its capabilities.

1. Overview

LobsterAI’s core is a Cowork system – a lightweight session manager that orchestrates Claude‑powered conversations, tool‑invocations and file manipulation.

Key architectural components:

Why Electron?

Electron gives us a deterministic desktop environment. It couples the speed of Node.js for heavy IO (email, database) with Chromium for a polished UI. Context isolation, sandboxes and typed IPC keep the system secure.

2. Getting Started

Prerequisites

# Node 24 or any 2025 LTS is fine.
nvm install 24
# npm >= 10
npm --version

Clone and Install

git clone https://github.com/netease-youdao/LobsterAI.git
cd LobsterAI
npm install

Run in Development Mode

npm run electron:dev

The app will open at http://localhost:5175 and launch a Chromium window. You can edit React components and see hot re‑loads.

3. Building for Production

The repo uses electron‑builder. Build targets for macOS, Windows, and Linux are defined in electron-builder.json.

# TypeScript → bundle
npm run build
# Lint checks
npm run lint
# Build
npm run dist

The installers are placed in the release/ folder:

4. Extending LobsterAI – Adding a Skill

Each skill is a lightweight module that exposes a skill.json schema and an executable handler.

1. Create a new folder under SKILLs/ (e.g., markdown/).
2. Add skill.json with name, description, and entry points.
3. Place a Node script or compiled binary for the skill.
4. Enable it in skills.config.json.
5. Restart the app.

The repo ships with 16 built‑in skills: web-search, pptx, remotion, playwright, imap-smtp-email, etc. Feel free to clone one and tweak for your own needs.

5. Remote Control via IM

LobsterAI listens on four IM platforms. Each integration requires a token/secret that you set in Settings → IM Gateways.

Once a token is present, the app exposes a bot that accepts a simple natural‑language command. For example:

Hey Lobster, generate a weekly summary PPT from the last 10 emails.

The bot authenticates, authorizes, then spawns a Cowork session and streams the result back to your phone.

6. Security Highlights

7. Contributing

1. Fork → clone.
2. Create a topic branch (git checkout -b feat/new‑skill).
3. Commit with a conventional message (feat: add markdown skill).
4. Push and open a PR.

We welcome documentation, new skill templates, and bug‑fixes. Make sure to run npm run lint before submitting.

8. Usage Scenarios

9. Conclusion

LobsterAI demonstrates that a full‑featured AI personal assistant can be built on open‑source tooling. From local file manipulation to remote scheduling, it covers the spectrum of everyday productivity tasks. With a robust architecture, sandboxed execution, and mobile‑friendly IM controls, it’s ready for both hobbyist experimentation and enterprise‑grade deployment.

Give it a try, fork the repo, and start building your own AI workflows today!