About the creator

Franklin BE is a local-first AI platform and a builder's edition for self-hosters.

Brent Moon (aka dfrank) builds small, privacy-focused developer tools and demos. Franklin BE started as a technology demo to showcase local-first AI flows and has evolved into a Builder's Edition for developers who want private, file-centric AI tooling.

About Brent

Brent is a self-taught developer, builder, and homelab enthusiast with an unconventional background. By day he works in the tractor-parts industry; by night and on weekends he writes code, builds systems, and experiments with local AI. He didn’t come from a startup, a bootcamp, or a team of engineers — he built Franklin the way homelabbers build their networks: step by step, late at night, between responsibilities, with patience and determination.

Philosophy & goals

Franklin began as a simple idea: AI should run on your own machine — not someone else’s. No cloud lock-in. No data leaving your server. No hidden pipelines. Just real tools you can inspect, control, and trust. Brent believes that if people can self-host media servers, databases, VPNs, and home labs, they should be able to self-host powerful AI just as easily. Franklin is his answer to that belief — a local-first AI system designed for real builders.

What Franklin includes

  • FastAPI backend
  • Hybrid TinyLlama + GPT-4o routing
  • File-level tools (list_dir, read_file, summarize_file)
  • Modular plugin system
  • Clean, responsive Web UI
  • Full automated test suite

Contact & links