The fork now has a real marketing site - and a quiet bug fix that probably matters upstream.
Davemaina1/iroh_
Davemaina1 is reshaping Mike into Iroh, a Claude-powered legal assistant grounded in Kenyan law and tuned to run on a free-tier budget.
Iroh is Davemaina1's fork of Mike, repositioned as a Kenyan-law legal assistant. The surface has been rebranded end-to-end - users see Iroh in the product and on a new marketing site - while the underlying engine is being rewired around a specific bet: Claude as the sole model provider, and Kenyan statutes and case law as the knowledge base the assistant is willing to speak about.
The more interesting work sits underneath. Davemaina1 has built an end-to-end citation pipeline with stable chunk IDs so lawyers can actually trust what the assistant tells them, paired with an honesty contract that makes the model refuse rather than guess when it doesn't have grounding. The retrieval layer runs as a Python sidecar squeezed into 320MB of RAM to fit a free-tier server while indexing roughly 86,000 chunks of Kenyan law.
There's also evidence of someone shipping a real product, not just a tech demo: a marketing landing site, a premium polish pass, a small but careful fix for display names quietly disappearing between logins. If you want to see how a solo builder takes an open-source legal assistant and aims it at one jurisdiction on a shoestring, this is a fork worth clicking through.
What's in it
- Kenyan law, grounded The assistant is wired to refuse rather than guess on Kenyan statutes and cases, leaning on a dedicated retrieval layer instead of model recall.
- Trustworthy citations An end-to-end citation pipeline with stable identifiers means a lawyer can follow any claim back to the underlying source.
- Free-tier-friendly retrieval A Python sidecar runs an 86,000-chunk legal search index inside 320MB of RAM - a deployment story worth studying if you're shipping on a budget.
- Claude-only, with mode selector Multi-vendor model support is gone, replaced by a three-button mode selector that bets the whole experience on Anthropic.
- Iroh branding and storefront A surface-level rename to Iroh paired with a new marketing landing site and a premium polish pass.
- Quieter product fixes Small but real reliability work, like stopping users' display names from vanishing between logins.
Direction
searchbrandinginfrastructure
Activity
A small but real bug fix: users were losing their first names between logins, and the fork has a clean three-part patch.
A scrappy re-architecture that runs an 86,000-chunk Kenyan law search engine on a free-tier server - and points at a pattern worth stealing.
A small plumbing change with an outsized effect on whether a lawyer can trust what the AI just told them.
📝 Node-local RAG plumbing iterations (later abandoned) (no public page) 5 commits 14d ago not yet rewritten
The fork rewires the assistant to refuse rather than guess when it's asked about Kenyan statutes or cases.
A light-touch cosmetic rename: users see Iroh everywhere, but under the hood it's still Mike.
The fork rips out multi-vendor AI support and replaces the model picker with a three-button mode selector.
📝 Baseline lockfile refresh for local Iroh run (no public page) 1 commit 14d ago not yet rewritten
Threads of work (detailed view)
Davemaina1 puts a storefront on Iroh
The fork now has a real marketing site - and a quiet bug fix that probably matters upstream.
Davemaina1 stops display names from quietly vanishing
A small but real bug fix: users were losing their first names between logins, and the fork has a clean three-part patch.
Davemaina1 squeezes legal search into 320MB of RAM
A scrappy re-architecture that runs an 86,000-chunk Kenyan law search engine on a free-tier server - and points at a pattern worth stealing.
Davemaina1 makes citations actually trustworthy
A small plumbing change with an outsized effect on whether a lawyer can trust what the AI just told them.
Davemaina1 puts Mike on a Kenyan-law honesty contract
The fork rewires the assistant to refuse rather than guess when it's asked about Kenyan statutes or cases.
Davemaina1 rebrands Mike as Iroh, surface only
A light-touch cosmetic rename: users see Iroh everywhere, but under the hood it's still Mike.
Davemaina1 bets the whole stack on Anthropic
The fork rips out multi-vendor AI support and replaces the model picker with a three-button mode selector.