Three layers. All of them yours.
Potluck is not a chatbot with a subscription. It is infrastructure you run, own, and govern — designed from the ground up to be the opposite of a hosted vendor service.
The architecture, plainly
- 1.
Your device runs the models.
The Potluck desktop app installs strong open-source models locally. Inference happens on your CPU or GPU — no network request, no vendor server, no prompt log. Local models today are good enough for the majority of daily AI work.
- 2.
A local MCP server holds your memory.
A Model Context Protocol server runs on your machine and stores facts, decisions, active tasks, and references — persistently, across sessions and across agent vendors. Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Continue, Zed. Whatever coding agent you use next week can read what you saved this week. Your context, not the vendor's.
- 3.
A WireGuard mesh connects your machines.
The mesh sidecar handles NAT traversal automatically — IPv6 direct path first, UDP hole-punch second, cooperative-operated DERP relay as a last resort. No root access. No kernel module. Traffic between your machines is encrypted end-to-end.
- 4.
When you need more, the cooperative has capacity.
Network mode is opt-in. When you choose it, the coordinator dispatches your request to a contributor peer. Before forwarding, the coordinator strips your member identity from the job message — the contributor serving your request never knows whose it is. This is enforced by schema, not by convention, and tested in CI on every commit.
Persistent memory for your AI agents
Every time you work with an AI coding agent, you re-explain yourself. What stack you are using. What decisions you have already made. What you tried that did not work. That context lives in your head — and disappears the moment the session ends.
Potluck ships a local MCP server that stores this persistently. Facts, decisions, active tasks, and references — written and read by any MCP-aware coding agent. Save something in one agent; it is there when you switch to another next week.
The memory server runs on your machine. The data never leaves unless you choose to sync it. Your context is yours.
A mesh that connects your machines — no third-party VPN
Most people have more than one machine. Their laptop at home, their desktop in the office, maybe a server sitting in a closet. Getting those machines to talk to each other means either paying for a VPN service or configuring port forwarding and hoping your ISP cooperates.
Potluck ships a WireGuard mesh sidecar that handles this automatically. Install the app, click "Add another machine," scan the QR code on the second machine. The two machines find each other across NATs, through firewalls, across ISPs — no Tailscale account, no separate daemon, no terminal commands.
The mesh runs userspace WireGuard. No root access required. No kernel module. Traffic between your machines is encrypted end-to-end — the relay server sees encrypted bytes, not content.
Cooperative compute — shared capacity, shared upside
A strong local model on a good machine is fast. But not everyone has a good machine, and even good machines have limits. When a member needs more compute than their device can provide, the cooperative has capacity to offer — contributed by other members who have hardware to spare.
When you opt into "network mode" for a session, your request is dispatched to a contributor peer that advertises the required model. The dispatch is blinded at the protocol layer: the coordinator strips your identity before forwarding the job. The contributor serving your request never knows the request was yours. This is enforced by schema — the message type has no field where member identity could live — and tested in CI on every commit.
Contributors earn credits for the work they serve. Active contributors who opt in also earn real equity in the cooperative — vested over time, tied to measured contribution. Not tokens. Real shares in a real company, under a charter that prevents the co-op from being sold out from under the people who built it.
Understand how the cooperative is structured legally and who governs it.
Governance structure