UFO Documentation

What is UFO?

UFO is a chat workspace that runs on your own machine. You install it once. You open ufo.alienz.ooo from any browser, any device. Your machine at home does the work. You watch it happen.

The AI doing the thinking is yours to pick. Claude by default — any provider you plug in, or a local model, is fair game.

Why not Slack, Discord, Telegram?

Generic chat apps weren't designed for AI. No per-channel AI context. No message edits that stream as the AI thinks. No scheduling a prompt to fire at 9am. No way for an AI to render a live dashboard inside the chat. UFO ships all of them. Every design call came from running it as a daily driver for months.

Key principles

• Your machine, your compute. UFO runs on your hardware. No cloud bills paid by us, no rate limits imposed by us.
• Your data stays local. Every message, every file, every AI reply lives under ~/.ufo/ on your computer. We couldn't read it if we wanted to.
• Pick your brain. Claude, GPT, Gemini, Ollama — UFO routes to whichever you configure. Swap models per-prompt. No lock-in.
• Ride with Anthropic. UFO inherits every Claude Code improvement automatically. When Claude gets better, UFO gets better.

Install

macOS

Download UFO for macOS. Drag into Applications. Open it once. It lives in the menu bar — no Dock icon, no clutter. Signed, notarized, auto-updating via Sparkle.

Apple Silicon only. The app prompts for Screen Recording, Microphone, and Full Disk Access on first launch. Grant what you need; you can change it later.

Linux

Portable AppImage — download, chmod +x, run. Both architectures covered.

Windows

Portable zip. Extract, run ufo-mothership.exe. SmartScreen will warn — click More info, Run anyway. Code signing and auto-update are on the roadmap.

First steps

1. Menu bar → Open Workspace. A browser tab opens.
2. Sign up. First user becomes the workspace owner.
3. Create a channel. Send a message. Watch the reply stream in.
4. Menu bar → Pair new device… gives you a short code. Open ufo.alienz.ooo on your phone, enter the code, log in. Done.

That's the whole setup. If you already had Claude Code running, it still works — UFO just adds a chat surface on top.

Channels & messages

Channels are independent conversations. Each channel has its own AI context, history, and participants. One for work, one for personal, one for home automation — all running in parallel on your machine.

What every channel gets

• Edit and delete your own messages. Edits propagate to other devices in milliseconds.
• Mention someone with @name. They get pushed; others don't.
• Schedule a message to fire at a future timestamp. Fire-and-forget automation.
• Attach files by dragging. Images, videos, documents — they stay on your computer; remote browsers stream them on demand.
• Per-channel notifications: everything, mentions only, or nothing.
• Badges and notes so a channel can surface its current state at a glance.

Mobile & remote

Pair once, use forever. Open ufo.alienz.ooo on any phone or tablet and you're looking at your Mac's workspace. Add to Home Screen (iOS) or Install (Android) for a native-feeling app.

Use cases from daily production use:

• Kick off a long task before bed. Check progress from the bus in the morning.
• Forward a photo to your home Mac from your phone's share sheet.
• Ask your home Mac to summarise something you just saw.
• Glance at the latest replies during a meeting, reply later.

Search

Everything you've ever said or the AI has ever replied, across every channel in every workspace you can read, indexed full-text. Snippets highlight the matched span so you can scan results fast.

CJK works (Korean, Japanese, Chinese match by character span). Narrow by sender. Jump straight into context around the hit.

Notifications

Per-channel granularity: Everything, Mentions only (default), None. No global "Do Not Disturb" tax — each channel decides how much it wakes you.

Notifications surface inside the workspace itself today. Native phone push (iOS / Android) is wired on the server side and ships with the mobile app, which is rolling out separately.

AI personas

Multiple AIs can live in one workspace. Each gets its own name, colour, icon, and system prompt. A "Designer" persona that critiques UI. A "Financial advisor" that refuses to talk about anything else. A "Tutor" that explains everything at a 10-year-old level.

They share channels like members of a team. Mention one specifically with @name, or let the default chief persona respond.

Under the hood they're all still Claude Code (or whichever backend you chose). A persona is just a durable system prompt plus a trigger rule.

Use GPT, Gemini, local models

Claude is the default because it's the closest fit for an agent-oriented workflow. But UFO treats the model as a plug-in: point it at OpenAI, Google, or a local Ollama instance and it routes automatically.

Configuration is one JSON file at ~/.ufo/models.json:

The built-in proxy (we call it Orbit) accepts Anthropic-shaped requests and translates them to whatever backend you wired up. If a model isn't listed, the request falls through to Anthropic untouched — so setting this up never breaks your existing Claude setup.

Privacy & data

UFO was built to make the privacy question boring.

What stays on your machine

• Every message, every attachment, every AI reply.
• Claude Code sessions and auth tokens.
• API keys you point models at.
• Personas, bot credentials, channel history.

All of it under ~/.ufo/. A plain folder. Your Time Machine / Arq / Backblaze / iCloud backup already covers it. Uninstall = drag app to Trash, delete the folder, done.

What flows through the relay

Only encrypted bytes between your browser and your own machine. The ufo.alienz.ooo relay is a tunnel, not a database. It couldn't read your messages if we wanted it to — the TLS session terminates at the browser and your Mac.

On the same network as your mothership? Point your browser at http://localhost:8787 and skip the relay entirely.

What's rough

Being honest about the edges.

• macOS is the first-class platform. Signed app, menu bar UI, one-click install, auto-update. Everything we polish goes here first.
• Windows is early. Portable zip. No installer, no auto-update, no code signing — SmartScreen will warn. Working on it.
• Your computer has to be on. If your Mac sleeps, UFO sleeps with it. Leave it awake or run a dedicated mini. That's the trade-off of "your compute, not ours".
• Push notifications need your credentials. FCM / APNs plumbing is built-in; you bring the keys. Most people skip it.
• Device revocation UI is missing. You can pair a new phone; to unpair one, log out of everything from the menu bar. A proper device manager is coming.

Hit something else? Open an issue. UFO is open source; every report gets read.