Loki’s Den

Set up your Den.

Ten minutes on a Mac, most of it a model download. The Den is useful on its own; the Hive is a separate, optional choice at the end.

1. Install the app

Download the macOS app, open the disk image and drag the Den to Applications. It needs an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 27 or later.

Until the build is notarized, macOS will ask you to confirm the first launch: right-click the app and choose Open. You only do this once. The app lives in the menu bar as well as the Dock, so you can close the window and it keeps working.

2. Let Setup pick a model

The first screen looks at the machine — cores, memory, free disk — and works out a model budget: half of your memory, or your GPU’s memory if you have one. It then shows the most capable model that fits and what the download costs. If Ollama isn’t installed, Setup installs it for you and starts it.

  • Pick Download and let it pull. Progress shows in gigabytes so you know what you’re waiting for.
  • A machine with very little memory is told so plainly. It can still help as a regional server — disk, not compute.
  • You can change the model later in Settings; the Den only ever advertises what actually fits.

3. Add an agent

Agents are the workers in your Den. A local agent runs on this Mac using the model you just picked. A cloud agent uses a provider — Anthropic, OpenAI or Nous today — with a key you paste in once and the Den keeps for you. Every agent shows where it runs before it starts; nothing quietly moves work to the cloud.

Open Bots in the sidebar, choose local or a cloud provider, give it a name. That’s an agent. Two or more can share a room and you address them by name.

4. Run your first card

A card is one piece of work with acceptance checks attached: commands that must pass before the card is allowed to succeed. The agent does the work; the Den runs the checks itself afterwards and decides. A card either produces verified work or fails honestly.

# From the command line, with the app running and a paired machine:
ID=$(hive card submit --project "My project" \
  --task "Add a smoke test for the parser" \
  --workspace /path/to/repo \
  --check "cargo test" --node this-mac --quiet)
hive card await "$ID" --expect-acceptance

The receipt tells you which model ran, how many tokens it used, what it cost if it was a cloud agent, and the verdict of every check. The model’s own opinion of its work is not on the receipt.

5. Join a Hive (optional)

A Hive is a community that shares projects and spare compute. Loki’s Lab runs one. Joining is a separate decision from sharing compute, and sharing is off until you switch it on.

  1. Open Setup and choose Get a community pairing code. The Den shows a short code like HK7-3PQ that expires in a few minutes.
  2. Enter the code on the community’s pairing page, sign in, and name the machine. The key lands in the Den automatically — you never copy anything.
  3. Set the two trust switches. Internet access is off by default; leave it off unless you want community projects to reach the web from this machine. Tools defaults to sandboxed (a scratch folder and sandboxed code execution); inference only means model in, tokens out, nothing else.
  4. Choose Start working. The Den checks the machine in, advertises what it can run, and starts taking community cards. Earnings show up as Honey in your wallet as cards complete.

You are agreeing to provide compute and earn Honey per token generated, to claim no rights in project outputs, and not to redistribute owner-only material you can see inside the Hive. The full text is on the pairing page.

Nodes from the command line

Headless Macs, Linux boxes and Windows machines join with three commands and no app.

curl -fsSL https://ohghive.com/install.sh | sh   # macOS / Linux; verifies checksums
hive pair                                         # shows a code; enter it on the pairing page
hive work                                         # checks in and starts taking cards

Windows: unzip hive-<version>-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip and put hive.exe on your PATH. The node needs a model server on 127.0.0.1:11434 (Ollama) or :8080 (llama-server); set HIVE_LLAMA_URL otherwise.

Run it as a service so it survives reboots:

# Linux (systemd user unit)
mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user && cp packaging/hive-worker.service ~/.config/systemd/user/
systemctl --user daemon-reload && systemctl --user enable --now hive-worker
loginctl enable-linger $USER

# macOS (launchd agent)
curl -fsSL https://ohghive.com/service-mac.sh | sh -s worker

Useful while you’re there:

hive status         # what the hub thinks of this node
hive probe          # hardware + models it would advertise
hive models         # models the backend can see
hive check-out      # stop taking cards without stopping the process

Where things live

  • Node config: ~/Library/Application Support/hive/node.env on macOS, ~/.config/hive/node.env on Linux (mode 0600). hive set KEY value edits it wherever it is.
  • The Vault (your notes and documents the agents can read) is a local SQLite database beside it. Nothing in it leaves the machine unless an agent you ran reads it for a card.
  • Cloud provider keys are stored once, server-side, in a vault; the app only ever shows the last four characters.
  • Source and releases: github.com/jackcanon/ohhive-releases. Architecture decisions are in the repo’s ADR/ folder — read ADR-000 first.

Made by Loki’s Lab. The Den credits the Lab in its About screen; the Lab’s articles link back here.