-– Message for Product Team —
Hi,
I made an open-source application called Conduit, and I wanted to share a somewhat unusual product idea with you.
I originally built Conduit to solve three things I found frustrating about existing AI chat interfaces: true conversation branching, better navigation of conversation history, and durable local ownership of my conversations.
After using it for a couple of months, I reached an unexpected conclusion: I actually don’t want to replace frontier models with local models. I want frontier models inside an interface like Conduit.
Conduit represents conversations as persistent trees rather than linear transcripts, and allows different AI models to participate as separate experts in the same conversation. I think this could make a particularly interesting foundation for a frontier-AI client: cloud frontier models alongside user-owned local models, genuine branching, local conversation persistence, and portable Packs containing models and workflows.
There is also an unusual aspect to the project’s development: Conduit was built primarily by me in collaboration with frontier AI models themselves. In fact, many of the design ideas emerged directly from wrestling with the limitations of their existing interfaces, including branching, conversation history, and usage quotas.
I’m not looking for funding, acquisition, compensation, attribution, acknowledgement, or a partnership. Conduit is open source. I simply thought the underlying interaction model might be interesting to the people building the frontier-model clients themselves, and I’d be happy for your team to take whatever ideas or code are useful mainly with a view towards me personally enjoying an improved user experience with local AI models.
A demo video, along with the source code can be found from:
Best,
&