Pencel

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Why Pencel? ​

Pencel is a local-first desktop app that organizes your recurring business operations — research, reporting, briefings, monitoring, and follow-through — into Programs, each with its own room to work in. It is built for the person who knows the work but doesn't write code.

Here's what makes it different.

Work happens in a Program room ​

Open a Program — RFP tracking, inbox triage, or one you set up yourself — and you get a room: a Slack-style conversation with the AI teammate that owns that work. Talk to it, drop in a file, tell it a standing rule. It drafts, finds, and reports back right there, the way a colleague would.

No agent or workflow editor required — but it's there if you want it ​

Behind every room is an agent (its role, instructions, and knowledge) and, for anything that should run the same way every time, a Workflow Pencel compiles from your conversation into concrete, ready-to-run steps — with approval gates before anything is sent, read-only boundaries, and cost ceilings. Most people never open these directly; a room can save a good reply as a recurring workflow with one click. If you want to configure any of it by hand, it's all there in Studio. See Agents, Approval workflows, and Creating your first agent.

Curate your own knowledge — from a local folder ​

Point Pencel at a folder on your machine and it imports your documents into a searchable Knowledge base. From there it builds a knowledge graph of the people, projects, and facts it finds, and links them to the source files. Your agents draw on this when they work — grounded in your material, not the open web. Files stay on your computer.

Self-learning memory ​

Agents accumulate Memory as they work — preferences, facts, and decisions worth remembering — so they get more useful over time instead of starting from scratch each run. You can review, edit, and prune what they remember.

Multiple models — including an open-weight option ​

Pencel isn't locked to one provider. Choose Claude (Opus 5, Sonnet 5), GPT (5.6 Sol, 5.6 Terra), or Gemini (2.5 Pro, 2.5 Flash). The managed Auto and Private plans can also route to an open-weight model (GLM-5.2) when it's the right fit. Match the model to the job — a cheap fast model for routine scans, a frontier model for hard reasoning. See Supported models.

Quick-start industry solutions ​

Solution Packs are curated bundles — a crew, connections, and guidelines for a specific job (federal RFP scouting, competitive intel, and more). Install one and you have a working Program in minutes instead of building from a blank room.

Manage to-dos as agent context ​

To-dos aren't just a checklist — they're working context for your agents. Capture a task (type it, or use the /todo quick form), and an agent can pick it up, act on it, and report back. See Using to-dos.

Create and edit real documents ​

Agents produce editable Artifacts you can keep working on: documents and reports, notes and drafts, spreadsheets, slide decks, HTML pages, and email drafts. Edit them in-app, or ask an agent to revise them in place.

See what matters on Home ​

Results post first in the room that produced them, and also roll up to Home — your surface for decisions and things waiting on you, plus a running feed of briefings that group related items so the important topics rise to the top. Opt into Radar and Pencel quietly scans in the background and posts insight cards about things worth your attention (read-only — it never acts without you).

Local-first and private ​

Your workspace — documents, agents, runs, and knowledge — lives in a local SQLite database on your machine and is never synced to Pencel's servers. Only model calls leave your computer, and on Private mode they route through a zero-retention proxy. See Data handling.

Where Pencel is headed ​

Today Pencel is a single-user desktop app. Team features — sharing agents and knowledge in a collaborative workspace — are on the roadmap. For now, curated Solution Packs are the way to share a working setup across people.

Start here ​