Aether Desktop

A self-hosted AI agent + RAG desktop app for Windows. Two modes, your data, your keys.

Normal mode a general AI agent with tools, skills, memory, and MCP — runs locally on your machine.

RAG mode the same agent grounded on your own PDFs via a hybrid Docling + BM25 + reranker pipeline.

It is the desktop companion to the AetherMind web RAG server. Same engine, different delivery.

Getting started

Download Aether-Setup.exe from the home page download section.
Run the installer — it extracts Aether to %LOCALAPPDATA%/Aether and creates Desktop + Start Menu shortcuts (with the Aether icon).
Launch Aether from the Start Menu or Desktop shortcut.
Paste your provider key in the left sidebar → Provider settings. We recommend a free OpenRouter key. The key is stored only in %APPDATA%/aether/.env on your machine — it is never sent anywhere except your chosen provider.
Chat. Toggle capabilities (Skills / Tools / MCP / Memory / RAG) and add PDFs in the RAG panel.

Where things live

Installation

%LOCALAPPDATA%/Aether/Aether.exe      # the app
%LOCALAPPDATA%/Aether/logo.ico        # shortcut icon

Your data (you own this)

%APPDATA%/aether/config.yaml          # settings + capability toggles
%APPDATA%/aether/.env                 # YOUR provider key (never ours)
%APPDATA%/aether/skills/              # skill library
%APPDATA%/aether/sessions/            # chat sessions
%APPDATA%/aether/rag_pdfs/            # your PDFs
%APPDATA%/aether/chroma/              # local vector store

Capabilities

Flip these in the sidebar to shape what the agent can do:

Skills — reusable prompt/procedure library.
Tools — terminal, file, web, code execution.
MCP — Model Context Protocol servers you configure in config.yaml under mcp.servers.
Memory — the agent remembers facts across sessions.
RAG — answers are grounded on your PDFs.

Configuration

Edit %APPDATA%/aether/config.yaml. Example:

model:
  default: "openrouter/free"   # or any OpenRouter model
capabilities:
  skills: true
  tools: true
  mcp: false
  memory: true
  rag: true
mcp:
  servers: {}                   # add MCP servers here

Gateway (optional)

The sidebar has a Gateway control to start/stop a Telegram bridge. It is inert unless you paste a Telegram bot token in settings — if you don't use it, nothing connects out.

Build from source

git clone <aether-desktop repo>
cd aether
pip install -r requirements.txt
python -m PyInstaller --name Aether --windowed --onefile \
  --add-data "desktop_ui;desktop_ui" build_aether.py
python make_installer.py   # produces dist/Aether-Setup.exe

Privacy

Aether ships without any API key. It talks only to the provider you configure and (optionally) a gateway you enable. The distributed build contains no credentials.

Aether Desktop is part of the AetherMind project — a 2-in-1 suite: a hosted web RAG server and a self-hosted desktop agent. See the GitHub repos for source.