klatch

Klatch

A Slack-inspired, local-first web app for managing Claude AI conversations.

Klatch gives you a persistent, channel-based interface for working with Claude — like having a private Slack workspace where every channel is a different Claude persona with its own system prompt, model, and conversation history.

Why

The existing ways to interact with Claude are good but fragmented:

• claude.ai is polished but cloud-only — you don’t own your data, and you can’t customize the interface
• Claude Code is powerful for development but lives in the terminal
• The API gives you full control but no UI

Klatch fills the gap: a single local interface where you control the models, the prompts, the conversation structure, and the data. Everything stays on your machine in a SQLite database. The only external dependency is the Anthropic API itself.

What it does today

Klatch is being built incrementally, one working step at a time (Gall’s Law). Here’s what works right now:

• Channel-based conversations — create named channels with custom system prompts, switch between them freely
• Streaming responses — Claude’s responses appear token-by-token via Server-Sent Events
• Persistent history — conversations survive page reloads and server restarts (SQLite)
• Markdown rendering — syntax-highlighted code blocks, formatted text, copy-to-clipboard
• Opus 4.6 by default — uses Claude’s most capable model out of the box

Where it’s headed

The full roadmap is in the repo, but the key milestones are:

1. Single channel chat ✓
2. Channel sidebar + creation ✓
3. Markdown + code blocks ✓
4. Conversation management — clear history, regenerate, stop generation (next)
5. Channel configuration — edit names/prompts, per-channel model selection
6. Multi-entity chat — multiple Claude personas in one channel (roundtable, panel, directed modes)
7. Search + export — full-text search, markdown export, command palette
8. Import from Claude Code & claude.ai — bring your existing conversations into Klatch

The long-term vision is a unified control plane for all your Claude interactions — a place where you can import context from any source, define persistent roles, and manage ongoing conversations across projects.

Quick start

git clone git@github.com:Design-in-Product/klatch.git
cd klatch
echo 'ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your-key-here' > .env
npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173. The server runs on :3001, the client on :5173.

Tech stack

Layer	Choice
Frontend	Vite + React 19
Backend	Hono (TypeScript)
Database	SQLite via better-sqlite3
Streaming	Server-Sent Events (SSE)
Styling	Tailwind CSS v4
AI	Anthropic SDK

Monorepo via npm workspaces: packages/shared, packages/server, packages/client.

How this is being built

Klatch is a collaborative project between a human product designer (mediajunkie) and Claude (Anthropic’s AI). The human drives product direction, architecture decisions, and design values. Claude writes the code, proposes technical approaches, and flags trade-offs.

Every feature follows Gall’s Law: start with the smallest thing that works, test it, then extend. No speculative abstractions, no premature optimization. The architecture log records every decision and why.

License

MIT