AI tools, built for teams who want the benefits of AI development without giving up control of their code. Forage gives your AI coding assistant instant knowledge of your codebase — plus a full coding harness, living documentation, and compliance analysis. Software Factory finds bugs and builds features on its own, and hands you a pull request to review. Both are self-hosted and support self-hosted models: your data never trains someone else's model, and your business keeps running even if a frontier provider changes its price, its terms, or shuts down.
Why we built this
Most AI coding assistants start from zero every time — re-reading your files, guessing at context, and burning your budget on repeated work. And most "autonomous" coding tools ask you to hand your codebase to someone else's cloud. Squrl Labs takes a different approach: software that runs on your machines, under your control, and does real work while your team focuses on what matters most.
That includes the model. Every Squrl Labs product supports self-hosted inference — run Ollama or another local model instead of a frontier cloud API. Self-hosting means your code and context never train someone else's model, you can swap or experiment with models freely as better ones ship, and your business keeps running exactly as it does today even if a frontier provider raises prices, changes terms, or disappears.
Our products
Use one on its own, or run them together — Software Factory can even drive Forage as its coding agent.
AI-powered codebase knowledge, fully local
Your AI coding assistant already knows how to write code — it just doesn't know your code. Forage builds a living map of your entire codebase so tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf can find the right answer instantly, instead of re-reading files over and over. The result: faster answers, lower AI bills, and a team that spends less time waiting.
Best for: engineering teams who want their existing AI tools to work faster and cost less, without changing how they work.
Autonomous AI bug-fixing and feature delivery
Every team has a backlog nobody has time for. Software Factory watches your repositories, finds bugs and triages feature requests on its own, and carries each one through to a real, reviewable pull request — unattended, or with your team approving each step. You wake up to finished work instead of a longer to-do list.
Best for: teams with a growing backlog who want to ship more without hiring more.
How it fits together
Forage, Software Factory, and Squrl Nest are built by Squrl Labs to work together — use one on its own, or run the whole stack.
A knowledge graph, coding harness, documentation generator, and compliance analyzer — all local-first, all built by Squrl Labs.
A self-hosted pipeline, also developed by Squrl Labs, that carries issues from triage through a reviewable pull request — and can use Forage as its coding agent.
Repository hosting built into your Squrl Labs account — push, pull, clone, browse, and manage issues, no separate signup required.
Common questions
Forage makes your existing AI coding assistant smarter and cheaper to run by giving it instant knowledge of your codebase. It also provides a full-feature coding assistant in case you don't already have one. Software Factory is a separate, self-hosted service that actively monitors your repo for newly opened tickets & reported issues, autonomously finds & fixes bugs, builds features for you, and opens pull requests for your team to review. Many teams use both — Software Factory can even use Forage as its coding agent.
Basic technical comfort helps (both install as a single download or Docker container), but neither product requires custom engineering to get running. Our Getting Started guide walks through setup in minutes.
No. Our products are designed to run on your own infrastructure — your laptop, your server, or your private cloud account. Your code isn't required to be uploaded to Squrl Labs or any third party for either product to work. However, this is based on the assumption you are also self-hosting a compatible LLM inference engine and model, such as self-hosting Ollama with a model like qwen3.8 or similar. If you're using frontier model providers, like Anthropic (Claude) or OpenAI (ChatGPT), some of your code will be sent to their servers.
Forage is priced per user, billed monthly or annually. Software Factory is priced in flat monthly or annual tiers based on how many repositories you connect. Both have transparent, published pricing — see Forage pricing or Software Factory pricing — and both offer a free trial before you pay anything.
Yes. Our products offer a free trial — download and run them for real before deciding whether to purchase a license. No credit card required to start.
That's exactly what Software Factory's Supervised mode is for — a person approves every stage before it moves forward. You can run it that way indefinitely, or switch to Auto mode once you've built trust in the results. Furthermore, it's up to you to decide which pull requests get merged, so only deploy what you want and nothing else.
Squrl Nest is a secure, collaborative platform for storing, managing, and sharing software projects. Think of it as GitHub, but built and operated by Squrl Labs — giving developers a familiar place to manage your code, collaborate with your teams, and control your development environment. It's included automatically when you create a Squrl Labs account, not a separate download.
Forage is a local-first codebase knowledge graph, AI coding harness, documentation generator, and compliance analyzer, developed by Squrl Labs. It builds a persistent map of your codebase so AI coding assistants query instead of re-read, and it can also write and maintain your documentation and run evidence-based SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / GDPR / HIPAA compliance assessments — all from the same knowledge graph, all running locally.
Software Factory is a self-hosted, autonomous software-development platform developed by Squrl Labs. It watches your repositories, triages issues, writes specs, implements the change, and opens a pull request for review — supervised or fully unattended.
Yes. Forage runs a first-class MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, so Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, and any other MCP-compatible agent can query your codebase graph directly instead of re-reading files. Forage isn't necessarily a replacement for the coding assistant you already use — it makes it faster and cheaper to run.
Yes — Forage and Software Factory both work with Ollama or any self-hosted inference server. Self-hosting means your code and context never train a third party's model, you're free to swap or experiment with different models as better ones ship, and your business keeps running even if a frontier provider raises prices, changes terms, or shuts down. Cloud providers like Anthropic and OpenAI are also supported if you'd rather use them.
Forage, Software Factory, and Squrl Nest are all built by Squrl Labs, LLC, a privately held, self-funded, independent software company founded by Lucus Darnell.
Free to try. No credit card required. Running in minutes.