You NEED to try these open-source AI projects RIGHT NOW

By: Matthew Berman

A roundup of four under-the-radar open-source AI projects worth installing today.

---

Matthew Berman covers four free GitHub projects you’ve probably never heard of — from a human-voted search engine to a tool that cuts token bills up to 90%.

Key Points

• Last 30 Days (~40k stars, by Matt Van Horn, co-founder of the company that became Lyft). A new kind of search engine: instead of Google’s ad-links, it searches Reddit, Hacker News, Polymarket, GitHub, X, YouTube, and TikTok in parallel, scores by real human upvotes/engagement, and has an AI agent judge synthesize one concise brief on what’s trending. Install as a skill, then /last30days <topic>; --emit=html produces a shareable brief page. Example shown on “loop engineering” — it resolved the topic, pulled 32 Reddit threads / 45k upvotes, and surfaced key patterns.
• Open Notebook (~30k stars) — a free, open-source, fully-local NotebookLM clone. Upload PDFs/articles, ask questions with references, generate multi-host podcasts (hyper-customizable scripts/tones), and run “transformations” (key insights, dense summary, paper analysis, reflection questions, TOC). Plug in hosted models or run it entirely locally via Ollama/LM Studio.
• Agent Skills (~56k stars) — seven / commands mapping to the seven stages of engineering: spec, plan, build, test, review, simplify, ship. Requires the spec via a /interview me flow, then does spec-driven development. Focused on the engineering workflow (vs. Garry Tan’s G Stack which targets whole companies).
• Headroom (~24k stars) — compresses everything an agent reads (tool outputs, logs, RAG chunks, files, history) before it hits the LLM. Same answers, fraction of the tokens: 92% savings on code search (17k→1.4k tokens) and SRE debugging (65k→5k), 73% on GitHub issue tracking, 47% on codebase exploration, with preserved accuracy on GSM8K/TruthfulQA/SQuAD-V2/BFCL. headroom wrap claude wraps Claude Code, headroom perf reports savings, headroom learn mines failed sessions and writes fixes to CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md.
• Installation gotcha (Headroom): it bundles Serena and enables telemetry by default — use --no-serna and disable telemetry, or strip them from the open source.

Note

Zero-config installs: copy the GitHub URL into your agent (Cursor, Codex, Claude Code) and say “install this skill.”

Sources / Links

• Video: You NEED to try these open-source AI projects RIGHT NOW