Every coding assistant forgets everything the moment you close it. Anvil is the private, encrypted brain that sits underneath — it remembers your projects, learns your style, catches its own mistakes, and hands all of it back to your AI on every prompt.
Not a mockup — a real 3D map of one Anvil brain, every memory, skill and project a star. Caught mid-thought: the Crucible's Embers debating a question around the core while housekeeping quietly works the local files. In the app you drag, zoom and fly through your own.
Your memory, projects and keys live on your machine, encrypted — nothing sent to a cloud you don't control. It's yours, on your desk, in a locked drawer.
Lose a provider, a licence or a connection and you drop a rung — you're never stranded. And it's honest when something's off, rather than pretending everything's fine.
Anvil Free isn't a crippled trial — the whole memory brain is yours, forever. Mentors, not ghostwriters; guardrails included.
The tools are incredible — and goldfish-brained. Close the tab and the context is gone: your architecture, the decisions you made, the bug you already fixed twice. So you re-explain yourself, forever. Anvil ends the loop.
Re-paste the same context every session. The AI repeats mistakes it "learned" yesterday. Your knowledge lives in a cloud you don't control, or in scrollback you'll never find again.
A brain that persists. It recalls the right memory automatically, refuses to repeat a logged mistake, keeps secrets out of the model entirely, and shows you exactly what it knows — as a living 3D galaxy.
Not a scratchpad — a structured, searchable long-term memory that gets denser and smarter over time.
It all lives on your machine, encrypted. Anvil endeavours to keep your secrets out of what's sent to the AI — a best-effort scrub, not a DLP guarantee.
Anvil turns lived experience into reusable skills and hard rules — including the mistakes.
Most AI is a black box. Anvil renders its mind as something you can actually look at.
A whole project brain — plans, tasks and architecture — wired into the same memory.
Bring your own models. Anvil routes across providers and falls back gracefully — even to your laptop.
Grounded answers, honest limits, and — for teams — the governance a company needs.
A full offensive-and-defensive security range built in, plus an audit Anvil runs against itself.
Every capability and its current state — Built, In Dev, or Coming Soon. 200+ features, honestly labelled.
The AI assistants are great at answering. The memory add-ons are cloud lock-boxes. Anvil is the only one that's a private, structured brain and wired straight into your agent.
| Capability | Anvil | Raw AI assistant Claude Code · Cursor · Copilot |
Memory add-ons ChatGPT memory · Mem0 · Letta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Persistent cross-session memory | ✓ deep & structured | ✕ forgets on close | ◑ shallow, per-account |
| Local, encrypted memory store | ✓ on your disk | ✕ cloud | ✕ cloud |
| Knowledge graph (facts + relationships) | ✓ | ✕ | ◑ some |
| Every memory is cited & traceable | ✓ grounded + provenance | ✕ no memory | ◑ opaque |
| Catches its own contradictions | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Learns skills & rules from its own work | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Multi-persona reasoning debate | ✓ the Crucible | ✕ | ✕ |
| Independent verifier on its own output | ✓ | ✕ | ✕ |
| Built-in security range (red-team + self-audit) | ✓ proving ground | ✕ | ✕ |
| Best-effort secret scrubbing | ✓ vault + scrub | ✕ | ✕ |
| You own your data — expire or delete anything | ✓ right-to-forget + TTL | ✕ | ◑ their servers |
| Visual 3D map of what it knows | ✓ the galaxy | ✕ | ✕ |
| Project management built in | ✓ tasks · blueprint · roadmap | ✕ | ✕ |
| Works fully offline on local models | ✓ | ◑ some | ✕ |
| No vendor lock-in — routes across providers | ✓ + failover | ✕ single vendor | ✕ |
| Keeps working if your subscription lapses | ✓ offline licence | ✕ | ✕ |
| Team brain + roles + audit | ◑ shipping in tiers | ✕ | ◑ enterprise plans |
We're genuinely fans of a lot of these tools — some we even run on top of. Here's how we see the landscape, no shade intended.
Their strength: reach and ecosystem — messaging channels, a huge model portal, agent training data, delivery everywhere an agent can show up.
Our angle: we go the other direction — deep on a private, encrypted, rigorously-structured memory brain. Anvil even leads on the trust bits (vault, signed context, contradiction detection, right-to-forget). Different lanes; plenty of room for both.
Their strength: unreal at writing code in the moment — fast, in-editor, great autocomplete and edits.
Our angle: they don't keep a private, structured memory of your work between sessions. That's the layer Anvil quietly adds underneath.
Their strength: the assistant you already love using every day.
Our angle: not a rival — Anvil connects straight in as the brain, so the tools you have suddenly remember.
Their strength: same good instinct as us — give the AI a memory so it stops starting from zero.
Our angle: we keep it local, encrypted and structured into a graph, not a cloud key-value box you don't own.
Their strength: brilliant at running models right on your machine.
Our angle: Anvil sits a layer up — the memory, learning, projects and governance around the model. (We happily run on top of Ollama, in fact.)
Their strength: lovely homes for notes you file and organise yourself.
Our angle: Anvil reads them in and feeds them to your agent automatically — the curating happens for you.
Small things that quietly make Anvil feel like it was built by people who've actually shipped software.
Grounding is injected on every prompt — the AI can't "forget" to check its memory.
Pull in Obsidian, OneNote & your whole chat history on first run.
A reasoning turn can go fetch its own data mid-thought.
Reaches logged-in pages (Playwright) when research needs it.
After N failed attempts it stops and escalates instead of looping forever.
Scans its own store for health — dupes, dangling links, stale facts.
See exactly what gets scrubbed before anything leaves your machine.
Diagnostics that never leak what you were actually working on.
Export/restore your whole brain — a real data-loss guard.
One download, three plans — the same app, unlocked by your licence. Your memory is never gated: the local encrypted brain is yours in full on every plan, forever. And it degrades gracefully — a lapsed licence or a downed provider drops you a rung, it never leaves you stranded.
On the roadmap, not yet in build — the direction we're forging toward.