01 — NGENT
02 — What NGENT Does
NGENT is one of the four product lines on the NOID projects page, and it's the one with hands. Install it once, on a machine you own, and it becomes a teammate you DM over NoidChat — one that actually does the work instead of describing it.
The installer targets your home directory on a box you own — a desktop, a home server, a spare machine in the rack. Linux is the primary target; macOS runs in terminal mode. No sudo, no system-level hooks. Delete the folder and it's gone.
You message your agent over NoidChat, NOID's end-to-end encrypted messenger — username-only accounts, no phone number, no email. Each install pairs its own fresh NoidChat identity, so the agent shows up in your chat list like any teammate.
NGENT executes jobs on your machine: shell commands, file work, scripts, research — the tasks you'd hand a junior teammate. Reads are open; writes and shell commands ask your permission first.
Durable facts survive restarts. Memory is plain files on your own disk, not a record in a vendor's database — always yours to inspect, edit, or delete. What your agent knows is never hidden from you.
When a job proves repeatable, NGENT captures the method as a skill and re-runs it on demand. The tenth time you ask is faster and more reliable than the first. Your agent compounds.
The agent answers to the person who installed it. An owner allow-list controls who can talk to it over NoidChat — anyone not on the list gets silence. Your box, your agent, your rules.
One honest boundary: the agent, your files, and its memory live on your machine, but its reasoning uses the model provider you configure, so the prompt for each task transits that provider under your own API key. Self-hosted, not air-gapped — the deep dive states the tradeoffs plainly.
03 — How It Works
From blank box to resident agent in three steps. The whole ritual is one command and one wizard.
One command from ngent.noid.gg puts NGENT in your home directory — no sudo required. Then ngent setup walks you through the rest: your model API key and the agent's configuration.
curl -fsSL https://ngent.noid.gg/install.sh | bash
Setup pairs the agent's own NoidChat identity. Add it to your chat list and DM it like a teammate — from anywhere, end-to-end encrypted, with no one sitting between you and your agent.
Give it real jobs and let it run them on your machine. When a job proves repeatable, NGENT captures it as a skill and re-runs it on demand — so your agent gets faster at your work the longer it lives with you.
Updates are the same motion: re-run the installer or use the built-in update command. Updates replace the engine and never clobber your data — the agent's identity, memory, and skills survive every update. NGENT ships fast in its V Alpha series, so the agent you install today keeps getting better without ever forgetting who it works for.
04 — Go Deeper
This page is the hub. These pages cover the parts around it — how a resident agent compares with a cloud agent SaaS, and the encrypted messenger every conversation with your agent rides on.
Resident vs cloud, dimension by dimension — including when a managed service is the right call.
The messenger it speaks through →How NoidChat wraps your messages in post-quantum ML-KEM encryption, end to end.
NoidChat overview →The encrypted, username-only messenger NGENT rides on — on web and Android.
05 — Get NGENT