On the inaugural episode of Very Good Engineering, Jorge Coca is joined by Joanna May, an Engineering Manager at Very Good Ventures, to dig into her pet project Cow, a local AI terminal companion built in Dart. Joanna explains that Cow lets you interact with a local AI model from the command line, similar to cloud coding assistants, but running entirely on your own machine rather than relying on an external service.
The idea grew out of frustration with the high costs of cloud-based AI tools like ChatGPT, and a desire for a personal, accessible alternative. Joanna is candid that building a local AI turned out to be genuinely hard, with much of the difficulty coming from integrating local AI models and wrestling with native bindings and package compatibility. She built Cow’s terminal interface using the Nocturne library, describing the experience as just like using Flutter, but for the terminal.
Beyond the technical work, Joanna and Jorge talk about the personality she gave the project, including an ASCII art cow mascot she crafted by hand. Cow reflects her mix of Flutter and game development experience, and the conversation lands on a recurring theme: the value of accessible, local AI and the simple joy of building something uniquely your own.