I built an open-source AI agent that drives a real browser and terminal in the background

Hey IH 👋

I've been building OpenAmer — an open-source AI agent that runs on a laptop and does computer-use work in the background, while you do something else.

The idea came from a boring frustration: I kept doing the same twenty browser-and-terminal chores over and over. So instead of another "chat with your docs" wrapper, I built the thing that actually operates the machine.

What it does

Background computer-use: drives a real browser (CDP) and a real shell, not just an API wrapper
250+ skills, stored as plain markdown — readable, forkable, fixable by anyone
Three-tier routing: local 2B model for cheap/reflex work, escalate to a bigger model only when the task is actually hard
Runs 24/7 at roughly 20W. Energy cost per day is under a kWh, which was a design constraint, not a marketing line
Everything is inspectable: episodic memory, world model, and the evolution log are just files on disk

Honest limitations
This is not a ChatGPT replacement. On genuinely hard reasoning it escalates to a bigger model, and the local tier is a 2B — it's good at repetitive operational work, not at clever one-shot thinking. The skills library is community-quality: some skills are excellent, some are rough drafts. If a skill breaks, you can read it and fix it, which is the whole point of keeping them as markdown.

Where it's genuinely useful
The wins so far have been unglamorous: monitoring sites and pinging me only on real changes, turning repetitive research into a scheduled loop, and handling the boring 80% of "go look this up and write it down" work.

If you want to follow along or try it:

Discord (most active place, I answer questions there): https://discord.gg/gckmapHrr
Support the project if it's useful to you: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/3HMBFYC9CQTMS
If you'd rather have it set up for your team instead of doing it yourself: https://openamer.github.io/openamer/consulting.html

Genuinely curious: what's the most repetitive task in your business that you'd want an agent to just handle quietly in the background? I'm looking for the next skills to build, and real workflows beat hypothetical ones.