01 — NGENT

A Self-Hosted AI Agent That Lives On Your Machine

NGENT is a self-hosted AI agent from NOID. It installs on hardware you own, and it stays there.

You message it over end-to-end encrypted NoidChat, it runs real work on your box, remembers what it learns, and captures repeatable jobs into skills it can run again on demand. No seat in someone's server farm. One command to install.

02 — Resident, Defined

What Resident Means

Most products sold as AI agents are seats in a vendor's server farm. Your prompts, your files, and your credentials travel to their infrastructure, execute there, and persist there under a retention policy you didn't write and can't verify. The agent isn't yours. You're renting proximity to it.

NGENT inverts the arrangement. Resident means the agent is installed on your machine, the way software used to be. Four things follow from that.

R · 01

On Your Hardware

The installer targets your home directory on a box you own: a desktop, a home server, a spare machine in the rack. No sudo, no system-level hooks. Delete the folder and it's gone.

R · 02

Readable State

Identity, memory, rules, skills, and schedule are plain files on disk. No hidden state, no opaque database. If you want to know what your agent knows, open the folder.

R · 03

An Encrypted Line In

You talk to NGENT over NoidChat, NOID's end-to-end encrypted messenger, from anywhere. Or sit down at the box and use the terminal. Either way, nobody sits between you and your agent.

R · 04

Yours Outright

Install once and it's yours. Re-running the installer is the update path, and it never clobbers your data: identity, memory, and skills survive every update.

03 — Real Work

What It Actually Does

A resident agent is not a chat window. It has hands. Day to day, NGENT behaves less like an assistant you consult and more like a teammate who happens to live in your rack.

W · 01

Runs Real Work

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.

W · 02

Remembers What It Learns

Durable facts survive restarts. Memory is a folder of plain text on your disk, not a record in a vendor's database, so what the agent knows is always yours to inspect or delete.

W · 03

Captures Skills

When a job proves repeatable, NGENT captures it 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.

W · 04

Schedules Its Own Work

One-shot timed tasks and repeating loops run against your machine's local clock. Tell it once and it acts later, without being reminded.

The messages carrying all of this ride on NoidChat: username-only accounts with no phone number or email, and direct messages wrapped in post-quantum ML-KEM key exchange over AES-256-GCM. How that transport works is covered in the NoidChat security deep-dive and the post-quantum encryption explainer.

04 — Resident vs Cloud

Your Box vs Their Farm

The differences between a resident agent and a cloud agent SaaS are structural, not cosmetic. Where the software runs decides who holds your data, who holds your credentials, and who can switch the whole thing off.

SIDE · A

Their Cloud

Cloud agent SaaS

Where it runs
The vendor's servers, shared with every other customer.
Where data lives
The vendor's infrastructure, under their retention policy.
Credentials
Handed to a third party and stored on their side.
Cost model
A recurring per-seat subscription, priced on the vendor's terms.
Offline capability
Nothing works when the service is down or your account lapses.
Customization
Whatever settings the vendor chooses to expose.
Who can switch it off
The vendor: repricing, deprecation, acquisition, outage.

SIDE · B

Your Machine

Resident agent (NGENT)

Where it runs
Your hardware, installed in your home directory.
Where data lives
Stored only on your disk. Content the agent includes in a prompt transits your chosen model provider; nothing else leaves the machine.
Credentials
Stay in your environment, on your box.
Cost model
Your hardware plus your own model API key, billed at usage by the provider you choose.
Offline capability
Files, memory, and skills stay on the box; only the reasoning step needs to reach a model provider.
Customization
Everything is a file: identity, rules, skills, schedule. Edit it.
Who can switch it off
You.

// Choose a cloud agent if…

  • You don't want to run a machine. Self-hosting means owning uptime, patches, and backups. That's real work, and a managed service does it for you.
  • You need vendor support and an SLA. NGENT gives you control. It does not give you a support desk with a contractual response time.
  • You work entirely from a phone. NGENT needs an always-on box to live on. No hardware, no resident agent.
  • You want maximum polish today. NGENT is live but young, shipping in its V Alpha series. Mature cloud agents currently offer more integrations and more finish.

05 — Tradeoffs

The Honest Tradeoffs

Self-hosting is a trade, and it deserves to be stated plainly.

You are the ops team. NGENT lives on your box, which means the box is your responsibility: power, disk, backups, updates. The update itself is one command, but nobody at NOID is watching your uptime for you. If that sentence made you smile, you're the audience. If it made you tired, use a managed service with a clear conscience.

The model call still goes somewhere. NGENT's reasoning runs on a large language model you configure through a hosted provider, OpenRouter by default. Your files, your memory archive, and your credentials stay on your machine; the prompt for the task at hand goes to the provider you chose, under your own API key. That is a far smaller surface than shipping your whole workspace into an agent SaaS, but it is not air-gapping, and we won't pretend it is. The agent and your data are resident. The raw model intelligence, by default, is not.

It's alpha software. NGENT is live and shipping in the V Alpha series. It improves fast, and it's young. Supported platforms are Linux as the primary target and macOS in terminal mode. If you need Windows, NGENT doesn't run there today.

06 — FAQ

Frequently Asked

Q · 01Is NGENT fully offline or air-gapped?

No. The agent, your files, and its memory live on your machine, but its reasoning uses the model provider you configure (OpenRouter by default), so the prompt for each task transits that provider under your own API key. Treat NGENT as self-hosted, not air-gapped.

Q · 02What do I need to run NGENT?

A Linux machine (macOS works in terminal mode), a terminal, and a model API key. The installer targets your home directory only and needs no sudo.

Q · 03Do I need a phone number for the NoidChat side?

No. NoidChat accounts are username-only, with no phone number and no email. Each NGENT install pairs its own fresh NoidChat identity, and your messages to the agent are end-to-end encrypted.

Q · 04How do updates work?

Re-run the one-line 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.

Q · 05Can I read what the agent knows about me?

Yes. NGENT's memory, identity, rules, skills, and schedule are plain files on your own disk. Open the folder and read it. Nothing is hidden in a vendor database.

07 — Install

One Command, Yours

NGENT installs from ngent.noid.gg with a single command, into your home directory, with no sudo:

curl -fsSL https://ngent.noid.gg/install.sh | bash # then: ngent setup

The setup wizard walks you through the rest: your model API key, your first skills, and pairing the agent's own NoidChat identity so you can message it from anywhere. Re-run the same command any time to update. NGENT sits alongside the rest of the NOID product line: independent software, built to answer to the person who installed it.

Install NGENT →

// Linux · macOS (terminal mode) · your machine, your agent, your data