Vitkilabs began in July 2026 with a small, stupid moment. Three hours into a hard problem with an AI coding assistant, we'd finally worked out the shape of it: the trade-offs, the dead ends, the one odd constraint that made the obvious answer wrong. The next morning the assistant knew none of it. So we explained it again. And again the day after.
The models are brilliant, and they have the memory of a goldfish. The "memory" on offer was a handful of facts on someone else's server. We wanted the tool to actually know our work, and we wanted that knowledge to stay ours, on our own machine. That became Anvil.
Anvil makes the AI you already use more capable: it remembers your projects, learns how you work, catches its own mistakes, and argues through the hard calls before it answers. It adds to what you can do; it doesn't do your job for you. We think of our tools as mentors, not ghostwriters.
It's built with the discipline of someone who has spent more than 30 years in systems architecture, security and enterprise infrastructure: local-first, encrypted, auditable, and designed to degrade gracefully instead of breaking.
Vitki (VIT-kee) is Old Norse for "one who knows": a seer, a reader of runes. It fits a studio built on compounded knowledge, and it sits well next to Anvil, the forge where the work gets shaped.
Your data stays yours. Free tiers should be real tools that get people ahead. Software should never hold you hostage. And we'd rather ship something honest and useful than something loud. The six rules we build by are on the home page.