K-Dense BYOK (bring your own keys) is a free, open‑source AI research assistant that runs on the researcher’s own computer. The researcher supplies any model—hosted or local—while the application provides the execution environment, scientific scaffolding, and a complete record. Each project is a regular folder, so data, code, results, and the notebook stay on a machine the researcher controls and can be read years later without the app.
What sets it apart from a chat assistant or a generic coding agent are three features: (1) a library of written scientific procedures, guided workflow templates, and catalogs of research data sources, plus reviewer and writer roles for task delegation; (2) a Living Lab Notebook whose entries are linked, can only be appended and never erased; (3) a log that records what the agent actually does by watching its actions, not by trusting its statements, and the log cannot be written to by the agent. This design targets the most common failure—model over‑claiming—identified in our benchmark of nine frontier models, making claims checkable rather than trying to prevent them.
On twenty interdisciplinary research prompts scored against a pre‑fixed rubric, K-Dense BYOK outperformed two managed platforms in both scientific quality and research execution. Its deliverables were the only ones that recorded the software environment and usually included a command to regenerate the results. The other platform’s environment records were files written by the agent, not part of the observed log, which currently does not capture the software environment itself.
The code is released under the MIT license at https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/k-dense-byok.
Review