An agent that works while you're away — and asks before it acts

What it does

OpenDuet is an open-source template for a proactive agent built on CopilotKit’s OpenBot platform. It greets you with a morning brief (what’s on, what changed, what needs a decision), triages your Gmail and calendar into “needs you” versus “can wait,” and keeps working on tasks in a computer of its own — a real browser, its own files and shell — while you step away. It’s reachable on the web, mobile, Slack, and Microsoft Teams.

The interesting bit

The safety model is the actual product: every state-changing action passes a reviewer, and anything that sends, pays, signs, or deletes pauses for Refuse / Allow once / Always allow. Passwords go through a masked secret box so the agent never sees them, and outgoing messages get scanned for sensitive data before they leave. It’s a proactive agent that treats “keeps you in the loop” as a feature, not a disclaimer.

Key highlights

• Triage with a one-line reason per email, measured against a labelled eval set in evals/triage
• Skills: reusable instructions you write once and invoke with /
• Routines for scheduled work, plus governed MCP connectors (Google Drive, Notion)
• Everything that makes it OpenDuet — name, Bots, channels, model, skills — lives in one folder, openbot/examples/openduet, so you can copy and fork it
• Self-hosted: your model choice, your database, Docker-volumed bot files and browser profiles

Caveats

• Early development, explicitly: it’s OpenBot with OpenDuet’s name and skills layered on top, and the README says to expect things to move
• Not fully self-contained — it requires a (free) CopilotKit Intelligence project for threads and memory; the server won’t start without that key
• Default model is OpenAI’s gpt-5.6-terra; other providers work but need explicit config

Verdict

Worth a look if you want a readable, hackable reference for how a proactive agent with human-in-the-loop approvals should be structured. If you wanted a turnkey executive assistant, it’s a template in active development — read the features table before trusting it with your inbox.