Shoal is a local AI coding platform. It runs coding tools against on-device models with no API keys, no cloud calls, and no telemetry. Crucible for direct GPU computation, MLX on Apple Silicon, llama.cpp on NVIDIA/AMD/CPU, with optional frontier API mooring for tasks that exceed local capability.
The system uses a multi-dock architecture where different coding assistants connect to a shared local inference backend. Keel Dock is a Go-based coding assistant with a terminal UI, architecture indexing, and autonomous refactoring. Pilot Dock connects to frontier APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI) as a supplementary reasoning backend. Claude Dock runs Claude Code CLI against local models via an Anthropic-to-OpenAI translation proxy. KV cache compression (KVTC) achieves 20x compression for efficient context retention across long sessions.