In plain words
It's four things, on your own Mac.
Tying it together is the Weaver — an assistant that runs on your machine and knows your own numbers and your own writing. Ask it, and it will set a reminder, add a calendar event, write a note or a journal entry, log a measurement, open a document or draft an email — in your own Mac's Calendar, Reminders, Notes and Mail, not a copy of them somewhere else.
It shows you a card first, and nothing happens until you tap it. It is never permitted to tell you it did something it did not do.
What it is
A lamp you own, not a screen that owns you.
Most software that knows you well knows you on someone else's computer. Your sleep, your blood work, your journals, your family papers — held elsewhere, read by strangers, mined for something.
The Lodge is the other arrangement. It runs on your own machine. The reading and the thinking happen there. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is sold, and no part of it stops working because a company changed its mind.
And it's bought once, not rented. The sleep score, the recovery number, the readiness ring — simpler apps charge you every month for readings your own watch already took. You paid for the watch. The data is yours. This just reads it, on your own machine, and keeps reading it long after you've stopped paying anyone.
The whole promise
It never leaves your machine.
Your health data, your writing and your documents stay on your own disk. The assistant runs locally. There is no account, no sync, and nothing to cancel.
About the AI
Yes, it's AI. That's usually the problem.
The Weaver is an AI assistant. It reads your numbers, your journals and your books, and it talks to you about them. Most people have four good reasons to be wary of that, and each one is a design decision here — not a disclaimer.
"It's watching me."
It runs on your machine. The model sits on your own disk and answers there. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no server holding your sleep, your blood work or your journals — and nothing to leak, subpoena or sell.
"It makes things up."
It may not state a number it hasn't read. If a reading is missing it says so. If last night hasn't synced, it tells you the data is a day old rather than quietly showing you yesterday's. Honesty is enforced in the prompt, not hoped for.
"It flatters me to keep me using it."
No scores, no streaks, no confetti. It shows you where you sit against your own baseline and says plainly when a week went badly. It isn't paid by your attention, so it has no reason to farm it.
"It'll get worse, or taken away."
There's no subscription to cancel and no company to change its mind. It's files on a disk you own. It works with the wifi off, and it will still work in ten years — which matters if you intend to keep decades of your own record.
If you came looking for a local AI
Some people arrive here from the other direction — not wanting a health app at all, but wanting a language model that runs on their own machine, of the kind the videos keep promising. That is what this is. The model sits on your own disk, and it works in two rooms.
The Library — NotebookLM's trick, without the upload.
Put your PDFs and ebooks in a folder. Ask a question and it answers from those passages, naming the book each one came from — and if your library doesn't cover what you asked, it tells you, rather than inventing something plausible. The difference isn't whose books they are — it's that nothing is uploaded to read them.
The Study — a conversation with something that has read everything here and remembers.
Your readings, your journals, your own history, all to hand. The familiar shape of a chat assistant, without the company on the other end of it.
No subscription, nothing counted, no account, and it works with the wifi off.
And the honest limit: it is not as clever as Claude or ChatGPT, and it won't be — those run in buildings full of machines. Ask this one to untangle something genuinely hard and it will lose the thread sooner. What you get instead is an assistant that has read your books and your history, costs nothing to ask, and never sends a word of it anywhere. For most of what you'd want day to day that trade is a good one, and for the rest the cloud is still there.
And the thing only a private AI can do
Because it holds all of it at once — body, calendar, writing, land — it can follow a thread across your whole life:
a drink → flattened overnight HRV → a worse recovery → less capacity for the day's work → the mood you wrote about that evening.
No rented assistant can join those dots, because no rented assistant is allowed to hold all four. That chain is the whole reason this runs on your machine.
See it
This is it, on an ordinary morning.
Not a mock-up. These are the real screens, with real numbers, on the machine it was built for.
The Hearth — the morning read · what the Weaver caught overnight · last night's signals · your journals
The Well — every signal as its own gauge. Tap one and it opens.
A gauge, opened. Most apps show body composition as percentages, which always flatter you — if fat % falls, lean % must rise. This one shows kilograms and names which tissue the loss actually came from. The note at the top is another gauge speaking up, because those two readings mean something together.
Who made this
I'm Kevin. I flew airliners until I broke my back, and became a herbalist and permaculturist instead. I'm 65, and I split my time between Sibiu and Șomartin, a small village in the Transylvanian hills where I'm bringing an old Saxon homestead back to life.
A blood panel last spring told me some things I needed to watch. I wanted to see the whole picture — what I ate, how I slept, what the walking was doing, what the drink was doing, and what I'd written about any of it. Nothing I could buy would show me that without moving my life onto somebody else's computer.
So I built it for myself. I've opened it every morning since. Everything on this page exists because I needed it, not because it tested well.
The rooms
One house, a few rooms.
You move between them the way you'd move through a house — not through a menu of features.
The Hearth
Home. Your morning read, what arrived overnight, the day ahead, and the Weaver waiting.
The Well
Your body, honestly. Sleep, heart, movement and recovery — read from your own devices, never invented.
The Library
Your books and notes, searchable by meaning. Ask a question, get answers grounded in your own shelves.
The Desk
Journals and studies. A place to think in writing, and to keep what you thought.
Trails
Guided paths for movement, food, sleep and habit — followed at your own pace.
The Weaver
The companion running through all of it. Warm, plain-spoken, and honest about what it doesn't know.
How it behaves
Honest before it is clever.
- It never invents a number. If a reading isn't there, it says so rather than filling the gap.
- It tells you when data is old. Yesterday's numbers are labelled yesterday's.
- Nothing acts without you. Every action it offers is a card you tap — or don't.
- No scores, no streaks, no nagging. It shows you where you sit against your own baseline.
- It works offline. Because it was never anywhere else.
Who it's for
People who keep their own records. Who'd rather read the raw number than a badge. Who have a shelf of books they actually use, land or work they're responsible for, and no interest in handing any of it to a platform.
Built by one person in Transylvania, for his own life first — which is the only reason it's honest.
For the technically curious — how it actually works
The Lodge is a Mac application. You download it, drag it to Applications and open it — the same as any other app. Under the lid it runs its own small server on your machine and nothing else; there is no cloud component, so there is nothing to sign in to and nothing to cancel.
The assistant is a local model. The Weaver runs on Ollama on your machine, in one of four sizes
chosen at install time to suit your Mac — from about 8 billion parameters up to 70. Your journals and health data are never sent anywhere to be
answered; the reading and the reasoning happen on your own hardware, which is also why it works with
the wifi off.
Your data arrives from Apple Health. Readings are exported from your iPhone and ingested into a local SQLite database. Sleep, HRV, resting heart rate, blood oxygen, breathing rate, wrist temperature, workouts, steps, body composition and ECG traces — all stored as files and rows you can open yourself.
Your library is indexed semantically. Books, notes and documents are chunked and embedded locally, so you can ask a question in your own words and get an answer grounded in your own shelves, with the sources named. Scanned PDFs are OCR'd on-device.
The agentic part is deliberately restrained. The Weaver can set a reminder, add a calendar event, write a note or a journal entry, log a measurement, open a document, or draft an email — each one through a tool it may only offer. It emits a structured tag, the app renders a confirm card, and nothing happens until you tap it. It is never permitted to say it did something it did not do.
It talks to your own Mac apps — Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Mail — through Apple's own frameworks, so what you add syncs to your iPhone through your own iCloud account. Nothing routes through us, because there is no us to route through.
The model is fitted to your machine, and to the job. Not every task needs the same size of brain: reading a number off a chart is not writing a reflection on six months of journals. The Lodge picks a model to suit both the work and the Mac it's running on — a smaller, quicker one for routine reading, a larger one where the thinking is worth the wait. On first run it looks at your machine and installs what fits it.
Written in Python, plain HTML and CSS. No framework, no telemetry, no analytics, no third-party scripts. The whole thing is files on a disk you own.
What you need
It runs on your Mac. Your watch can be almost anything.
The Lodge reads from the devices you already wear and stand on. Nothing new to buy if you have these; nothing to subscribe to either way.
And how capable is the assistant?
Two different things decide it. How much memory your Mac has decides which sizes fit. Which chip it has decides how fast they write: a Max moves memory about twice as quickly as a Pro, and an Ultra twice again — so two Macs with the same 64 GB can be twice as far apart in speed.
Not sure? Apple menu → About This Mac tells you both. Pick them and I'll show you which size you'd get, and how fast it would write.
Everything arrives through Apple Health on your own iPhone and stays on your own disk. No Earthway account exists, because there is no Earthway server.
The rule is simple: if it writes to Apple Health, the Lodge can read it. Which is a great deal more than most people realise —
Wearables & rings — Garmin · Polar · Suunto · Withings ScanWatch · Oura · Whoop · Ultrahuman · Scales — Withings · Renpho · Eufy · Garmin Index · Blood pressure — Omron · Withings BPM · QardioArm · Beurer · Heart & ECG — KardiaMobile · Polar and Wahoo chest straps · Glucose — Dexcom · Freestyle Libre · Sleep — Eight Sleep · Withings Sleep · AutoSleep · Training — Zwift · Peloton · Wahoo · Garmin Edge · Stryd · Concept2 · Food — Cronometer · MyFitnessPal · MacroFactor, so what you eat sits beside how you slept.
Reading it is one thing; showing it well is another, so here is where that stands. Finished gauges today: sleep, heart, movement, recovery, body, training and food. Read and kept, gauge still being built: blood pressure, glucose, ECG — your readings are stored from the day you start, so nothing is lost while I catch up. You'll always be told which is which.
You don't connect any of it to us. You never gave us anything to connect to.
Not finished. Not for sale yet.
It's in use every day and it grows most days. I'll tell you when it's ready — not when it's nearly ready.
Or come see where it came from — theearthway.com