Summary Friday is a self-hosted personal AI and automation runtime designed as a private execution partner. It addresses repetitive work automation by learning user workflows, acquiring skills, and executing tasks with explicit human approval for sensitive actions. Targeted at technically savvy users, it offers auditable workflows and human control within a local-first, privacy-conscious environment.

How It Works Friday operates via a "product loop": user goal -> capability assessment -> skill/tool acquisition (review-gated) -> human approval for sensitive actions -> execution -> verification -> learning. Key design choices include a local-first runtime, Bring-Your-Own-Keys (BYOK), and an "approval-first" safety model. This prioritizes inspectable, auditable state and reusable artifacts over automatic model-weight training, ensuring user control.

Quick Start & Requirements Installation options: npm (npm install -g @thesongzhu/friday, friday start), source (git clone, scripts/ops/friday-first-run.sh), or Docker (docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up --build). A first-run setup guides configuration of providers, channels, and permissions. Prerequisites: Node.js/npm, Git, or Docker. Users must supply API keys. Setup page: http://localhost:3141.

Highlighted Details

• Capability Acquisition (WIP): Automates gap identification, candidate finding, sandbox testing, and installation, but remains review-gated and under hardening.
• Inspectable Self-Improvement: Focuses on auditable state: preferences, routing, recipes, generated skills with tests, and failure lessons; excludes model-weight training.
• Safety Model: Prioritizes user control for sensitive actions via local-first runtime, BYOK, scoped grants, explicit approval for high-risk operations, and audit trails.
• Multi-Channel Integration: Supports Discord, Telegram, Feishu/Lark, Slack-style webhooks, Signal, WhatsApp, and QQ.

Maintenance & Community Community support via Discord (discord.gg/qXQRFg2u). Project issues tracked on GitHub Issues. Links to roadmap, vision, capability matrix, and extension guides are mentioned in documentation.

Licensing & Compatibility Distributed under the permissive MIT license, allowing broad compatibility with commercial and closed-source applications. Notes compatibility work for third-party agent ecosystem formats.

Limitations & Caveats Capability acquisition and self-upgrade flows are WIP and review-gated. Friday does not bypass security (CAPTCHA, logins), handle payments, or perform production-changing actions autonomously. Users are responsible for securing their host, keys, and accounts. Arbitrary third-party code execution requires explicit review.