famstack already files your family’s paperwork and turns it into a private wiki you can search and question in the chat. Until now there was a catch: someone had to know how to drive it. Name the topic room correctly, end a question with ?, remember what the archivist can and cannot do. In practice that means one person runs the server and everyone else asks that person.
0.3 beta 2 removes that person from the middle. It adds Stacky, an agent you talk to in plain language, and Stacky drives the rest of famstack on the family’s behalf.
The earlier releases built the family brain. This one gives it something that can actually use it for you.
#What Stacky is
./stack up agentThat brings the agent up. It needs two stacklets you probably already run, messages for the chat and ai for the model, and it answers using the local LLM you set in stack.toml [ai]. Nothing about your family leaves the Mac.
Stacky reads your vault: the same git-backed family memory the archivist writes to and the wiki is generated from. One copy, read by both. So its answers come from your own filed notes and documents, not from what the model happens to know.
Here it is with the Simpsons demo set the repo ships:
homer: stacky, when does the car insurance renew?
stacky: March 1st. The most recent premium notice is from November, filed under Springfield Insurance.
Before it replies, Stacky searches the vault and opens the topic or person page it needs, so the answer is grounded in a real document. When it cannot find one, it says so instead of guessing.
#What you get
You ask, instead of running commands. The archivist could already answer a question ending in ? with keyword search. Stacky is a step past that: a conversational agent that decides for itself what to look up. You do not have to phrase things a particular way or know the exact topic name. That is what takes the server from “one person’s tool” to something a family talks to.
It can act, not just answer. The archivist pulls action items out of your notes into a checklist per topic. Stacky can change those lists from chat, and every edit is committed to the vault under the person who asked:
marge: stacky, add “renew the passports” to the summer-trip list
stacky: Added to the summer-trip list.
So the todo list is not a thing you maintain in yet another app. You talk to it, and the vault keeps the record of who changed what.
It answers as your family’s, not “the agent”. [agent] name in stack.toml sets what it is called and how it refers to itself, default Stacky. One value, so a rename reaches the chat handle, the display name, and the voice at once.
#The rest of the release
Over a hundred commits landed since beta 1. The ones a family will notice:
- Todos that track. Action items become checkable lists per topic, ticked or added from chat and attributed to whoever did it. Every topic and person also has a stable
/golink to point at. - Mail into the server. Forward an email in and it files through the archivist like any other capture: read, tagged, filed. Off until you turn it on. Why: the family inbox is where half the paperwork actually arrives.
- Bots that stay quiet. The archivist marks a message 👀 when it picks it up and ✅ when it files it, instead of narrating every step in the room. React 🔖 to bookmark a message yourself, or set a room to react-only so nothing gets filed until you ask.
- Photos: bulk import and albums. A CLI for importing a large existing library and sorting it into albums, rather than one drag-and-drop at a time.
- Topic pages that read like pages. Topic wiki entries are structured now instead of a list of links, and each organisation you deal with gets its own page.
Under the hood: the vault format moved to the Open Knowledge Format (type and resource fields, existing installs migrate), and the wiki now renders from a projection of your vault so hand edits are not overwritten.
One thing to know if you run famstack today: Paperless is pinned to 2.20.15. The image tracked :latest, :latest rolled to Paperless 3.0, and 3.0’s redesigned tasks API broke filing. Pinning fixes new installs. If an auto-update already moved you to 3.0 it migrated your database, and 2.x will not start on a migrated database, so pinning back needs a pre-3.0 backup. The real 3.x move is coming on its own branch.
#Where it is rough
Stacky is a first version and behaves like one. Given a clear question and a vault that holds the answer, it is good. It can still pick a related note over the exact one, or take a question more literally than a person would. And a bot in a busy family room is an open problem on its own: when to speak, when to keep out of it, what belongs in a DM.
So this is a beta in the real sense. The beta 1 pieces have been running long enough to trust. The agent is new, and the next release or two are about hardening it and putting it through real family use rather than demos, not stacking more features on top. The way that gets better fastest is more people asking it real questions and telling me where it breaks.
#Try it
git clone https://github.com/famstack-dev/famstack.git
cd famstack
git checkout v0.3.0-beta.2
./stackThe User Guide covers what to say in the chat and what comes back; the Admin Guide is for whoever runs the Mac. If something breaks, or Stacky says something daft, open an issue or come to the Discord. This is the release where that feedback counts most.