Overview: Dyad is a local AI app builder designed for power users who want full control over their AI development environment. Unlike cloud-based alternatives like Lovable, v0, or Bolt, Dyad runs entirely on your machine, ensuring privacy and eliminating vendor lock-in. It supports popular LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Ollama, allowing you to use your own API keys without exposing them to third parties. This makes Dyad ideal for developers, product teams, and AI enthusiasts who prioritize data sovereignty, speed, and customization in their app-building workflow.
Dyad is built with TypeScript and React, leveraging Next.js for a seamless UI experience. It requires no sign-up or cloud dependency — just download, install, and start building AI applications locally. The project is partially open-source (Apache 2.0 for non-pro code), with a functional source license for premium features, making it transparent yet sustainable.
What You Get
- Local execution - Dyad runs entirely on your machine, ensuring no data leaves your system and eliminating reliance on cloud APIs for core functionality.
- Bring your own AI keys - You can input and manage your own API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Ollama without being forced into a vendor’s ecosystem.
- Cross-platform support - Dyad works natively on macOS and Windows, with a simple downloadable installer that requires no complex setup or containerization.
Common Use Cases
- Building private AI tools for sensitive data - Developers creating internal tools that handle confidential information (e.g., HR analytics, legal document summarization) use Dyad to ensure no data is sent to external servers.
- Rapid prototyping with full control - Product teams building AI-powered dashboards or chatbots use Dyad to iterate quickly without waiting on cloud API quotas or dealing with billing tiers.
- Problem → Solution flow: You need an AI app but don’t trust cloud providers with your prompts or outputs → Dyad runs everything locally, keeping inputs and generations private on your hardware
- Dev and AI enthusiasts experimenting with multiple LLMs - Users compare models like GPT-4, Claude 3, and Ollama-hosted LLaMA locally without switching platforms or managing multiple cloud accounts.
Under The Hood
Dyad is a sophisticated desktop AI agent platform designed for local development workflows, combining advanced agent architectures with a modular, component-based UI. It emphasizes structured code organization, extensive testing practices, and integration of modern web technologies to support both agent interaction and user interface design.
Architecture
The system adopts a layered architecture that clearly separates core logic, UI components, and infrastructure layers to support maintainability and scalability.
- The codebase is organized into distinct modules for database operations, file handling, UI components, and agent interactions, promoting clean separation of concerns.
- Virtual filesystem abstractions and component-based UI design indicate a well-thought-out approach to managing complex data and user interfaces.
- Repeated class patterns in test helpers and UI components suggest consistent design practices that enhance reusability and code clarity.
- Standardized interfaces govern component interactions, reinforcing modularity and supporting long-term maintainability.
Tech Stack
The project leverages TypeScript and modern web frameworks to build a cross-platform desktop application with robust tooling support.
- Built primarily with TypeScript and React, using Vite for fast development and Electron for cross-platform desktop capabilities.
- Integrates key libraries such as Drizzle ORM for database operations, Zod for schema validation, and Radix UI components for UI consistency.
- Uses Vite for streamlined builds and development, Drizzle Kit for database migrations, and Playwright for end-to-end testing.
- Vitest and Playwright are employed to ensure comprehensive unit and integration test coverage across the application.
Code Quality
The codebase demonstrates a mature testing strategy with broad coverage and consistent error handling practices.
- Extensive end-to-end and unit tests are implemented to validate user flows, system interactions, and component behavior.
- Error handling is consistently applied with try/catch blocks and custom error messages to improve robustness.
- The code maintains a generally consistent style and naming convention, though some technical debt is present in build and configuration files.
- Testing strategies encompass UI interactions, deep linking, and app lifecycle management to ensure reliability.
What Makes It Unique
Dyad introduces innovative approaches to AI agent development that distinguish it from conventional tools in the space.
- It uniquely integrates local development workflows with advanced agent architectures, enabling developers to build and test AI agents in a desktop environment.
- The platform implements novel patterns for agent-tool interaction and context management that support more dynamic and adaptive AI behavior.
- Its extensibility through component-based UI design allows for flexible customization and integration with existing development tools.