Vane is a privacy-focused, self-hosted AI answering engine that combines web search with large language models (LLMs) to produce cited, real-time answers. The system is built as a Next.js 16 application with a React frontend and a set of API routes that orchestrate a multi-step research pipeline: classification of user queries, parallel execution of search actions (web, academic, social, scrape, upload-based retrieval), widget generation (weather, stock, calculation), and final answer synthesis via an LLM. It supports multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, Ollama, LM Studio, etc.) through a clean provider abstraction, and stores chat history in a local SQLite database managed by Drizzle ORM. The architecture is a monolith with clear separation of concerns: a model registry for LLM/embedding providers, a search agent with an action registry pattern, a widget system for structured data display, and a configuration manager that persists user settings to a JSON file. The frontend uses client-side streaming via EventSource to display research progress and final answers in real-time. Deployment is Docker-first, bundling a SearXNG instance for privacy-respecting web search, with multi-arch images and a slim variant. Key entry points include the main chat page (`/`), individual chat pages (`/c/[chatId]`), a news discovery page (`/discover`), and a library for uploaded documents. The primary API endpoints are `POST /api/chat` (streaming chat), `POST /api/search` (non-streaming search), and various CRUD routes for providers, config, and uploads. External dependencies include SearXNG (self-hosted), Open-Meteo (weather), Yahoo Finance (stocks), and the LLM provider APIs. The codebase demonstrates strong engineering practices with well-defined abstractions, a modular agent architecture, and a focus on privacy and local-first operation. It is actively maintained with a large community, though some areas (custom migration runner, large chat hook) show room for refinement.
AnythingLLM is a full-stack, self-hosted AI chat platform designed for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) over private documents. It provides a web interface where users create workspaces, upload documents (PDF, DOCX, images with OCR, audio, etc.), which are then chunked, embedded, and stored in a vector database (default LanceDB, with support for PGVector, Pinecone, Qdrant, and others). Chat queries retrieve relevant document chunks and feed them to an LLM of choice (supporting 30+ providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, and local models via KoboldCPP). The platform also features an extensible agent system (aibitat) with plugins for file system operations, SQL databases, Gmail, Google Calendar, web scraping, image generation, and scheduled jobs. A separate 'collector' microservice handles document ingestion and format conversion, while the 'open-computer' subproject provides a QEMU-based virtual machine for autonomous browser automation. The frontend is a React SPA with multi-user support, role-based access, internationalization, embeddable chat widgets, and a community hub for sharing agent skills, system prompts, and slash commands. The architecture is a monolith (Express server) with the collector as an isolated service, and the open-computer as a standalone CLI/service. It relies on external AI APIs, vector databases, and local storage, making it suitable for both cloud and on-premises deployment.