CHICAGO - eTradeWire -- Chicago, Illinois. Smart Node, a crew of AI agents that runs a small business's front office on the owner's own server, is now open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. The crew answers messages, follows up on leads, books appointments and handles the paperwork, while the owner keeps the final say: quotes, bookings and anything that commits the business to a customer wait for the owner's approval. The source code and releases are on GitHub, and the current version is 1.14.1.

Smart Node was built by Dmytro Klymentiev, an independent software engineer in Chicago. Instead of a single chatbot, the owner sets up a small organization: specialist agents for the front desk, sales and the back office, rules written in plain words that the agents cannot cross, and workflows such as "a new inquiry checks the calendar, drafts a reply, waits for the owner's OK, then sends." Smart Node offers 50 ready crews for different kinds of business, from dental clinics and restaurants to plumbers and accounting firms, and 95 ready-made roles in 17 departments; a setup assistant adapts a crew to any other trade.

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The system runs on a machine the owner controls, an office computer, a home server or a small VPS. Customers, conversations and records stay there rather than in a vendor's account, and one panel shows every action the crew takes as it happens. A gateway routes model calls to Claude, GPT or Gemini, with a local model available on request, so the business is not tied to a single AI provider.

In a workflow, each step is done by one agent and handed to the next, and steps that commit the business wait for the owner's OK. The agents run on Flint, Smart Node's own open-source agent, which comes with every install; Claude Code works through an adapter as well.

Smart Node is free to run under the AGPL-3.0 licence on Debian or Ubuntu; a minimal setup needs 2 GB of memory and 10 GB of disk. Businesses that prefer not to install it themselves can have the Smart Node team set it up, tune the crew to their trade and connect their existing tools.

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Website: https://smart-node.app
Source code: https://github.com/dklymentiev/smart-node

About Dmytro Klymentiev
Dmytro Klymentiev is an independent software engineer and AI systems builder based in Chicago, with over 20 years of experience in software development and systems engineering. He writes about AI development, autonomous agents and LLM technologies at https://klymentiev.com.