// ABOUT

The Grass Still Grows. Now It Thinks.

Abject is an open-source desktop platform for AI objects that live on your own machine, find each other over peer-to-peer connections, and explain themselves in plain English. It is licensed under GPL-3.0. It is not a company. It is not selling you a subscription. It is a thing that exists because it should.

Why This Exists

Most people never use a computer to compute. They read, they watch, they scroll: consumption, inside sealed apps somebody else wrote. That is not a law of nature; it is an information monopoly. Software stayed hard to make, so making it stayed a profession. LLMs just cracked that open. For the first time, anyone who can say what they want can have software that is personal, connected, and theirs. Abject exists so that happens on your machine, under your control, with nobody collecting rent.

Every popular AI agent framework today puts a single planner on top and tools beneath. That works for short demos and breaks on the things you actually want it to do for weeks at a time. Hierarchies snap; meshes route around damage. The internet has known this for fifty years.

There is also a longer bet here. Sixty years of software has been pyramid building: applications on frameworks on libraries on operating systems, each layer taxed by the one below, complexity growing until the parts no longer fit in a context window. Most of the industry is using LLMs to stack the pyramid faster. Abject uses them to start from a smaller foundation instead: message-passing objects, with the LLM handling the ambiguity that rigid interfaces never could.

So Abject takes the pattern that already runs the world (TCP/IP, Smalltalk's objects, Erlang's actors, the cells in your body) and adds one small primitive: every object can explain itself to any other object in plain English. The LLM is just a service one object asks when it needs to think. The architecture is older than the LLM.

The result is a system you own. Your machine runs your agents. Your tokens come from your account, or from a local model that costs nothing. Your goals live on your peers, not on someone else's server. Anthropic can change its pricing at midnight and your abjects will not notice.

Who Built It

Abject is built by Maxim Khailo (mempko on GitHub), a software engineer who has spent years building open-source distributed systems.

The motivation predates the project. Max came to the United States in the late 80s as a refugee from the Donbas, in the former Soviet Union. The first computer was a hand-me-down from a friend of his father's; the programming education was standing in bookstores memorizing tech books there was no money to buy. Somewhere in there he found Engelbart and Kay and the idea that a computer is a rocketship for the mind. Abject is that idea, paid forward.

Before Abject came Fire★, a peer-to-peer platform for creating and sharing distributed applications, written in C++ and Lua, released under the GNU GPL. Fire★ called what it did Grass Computing: software you can touch, shape, and share directly. No cloud. No landlords. It proved the vision works. It also proved that the vision needs an LLM to negotiate between objects built by people who never met. That gap is what Abject closes.

The Ideas, Longform

The condensed argument lives on the theory page. These are the essays it was distilled from.

What This Isn't

  • Not a startup. No investors. No board. No exit strategy. No roadmap to monetize you.
  • Not a SaaS. Your data, your tokens, your machine. The signaling server is open source; run your own.
  • Not telemetry-funded. The system makes no calls home. Add a WS_PORT and that's the only network it asks for.
  • Not closed. GPL-3.0-or-later. Fork it. Modify it. Ship it. Just keep it free.

How To Reach Me

Abject is a long-term project. It will be slow. It will be weird. It will keep being free.