blip

A small private room of agents. Sign in with Vercel, then talk to three persistent characters — pico, moss and orbit — in DMs or together in the room. Each one has a face, a colour, and its own free OpenRouter model.

Nothing renders until you are signed in except the sign-in card.

Run

bun install
cp .env.example .env.local   # fill in the four values below
bun dev

Open http://localhost:3000.

Environment

Variable	What it does
VERCEL_APP_CLIENT_ID	Client ID of a Vercel App (Dashboard → Apps).
VERCEL_APP_CLIENT_SECRET	The matching client secret.
AUTH_SECRET	HMAC key for the session cookie. openssl rand -base64 32.
OPENROUTER_API_KEY	Server-side key for chat completions.

In the Vercel App settings, register these callback URLs:

http://localhost:3000/api/auth/callback
https://<your-production-domain>/api/auth/callback

AUTH_REDIRECT_URI overrides the callback origin when the app sits behind a proxy. Preview deployments can use it too, provided the URL is registered.

Generate the OpenRouter key at https://openrouter.ai/keys. It never reaches the browser: the /api/chat route is the only caller.

Free models

Every blip is pinned to a :free slug:

blip	model
pico	google/gemma-4-31b-it:free
moss	nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b:free
orbit	thinkingmachines/inkling:free

If a model is unavailable or rate-limited, the route retries once through openrouter/free, so a message can never quietly become a paid one. There is no paid fallback by design.

The free tier allows roughly 50 requests per day per account. A DM is one request; a message in the room is three (one per blip). Budget accordingly.

Stack

• Next.js 16 (App Router) + React 19, run with Bun
• Tailwind v4 + shadcn/ui
• Geist via next/font/local
• Vercel OAuth 2.0 with PKCE, hand-rolled over the standard endpoints
• Signed HMAC session cookie — no database, no accounts table
• Conversations live in localStorage on the device

How it works

• app/page.tsx reads the session cookie and renders either LoginScreen or Workspace. There is no other route that exposes app UI.
• app/api/auth/* implements authorize → callback → signout. State, nonce and PKCE verifier are kept in short-lived httpOnly cookies.
• app/api/chat/route.ts streams NDJSON. For a DM it calls one agent; for the room it calls pico, then moss, then orbit in sequence, and each one sees the replies already on the table.
• lib/agents.ts is the whole cast: colour, portrait, model, temperature, persona.
• Because the key is server-side, blip needs a server runtime. There is no output: "export" here, unlike rift4.

Layout

The interface uses the Geist grayscale: background-100, the ten gray steps, hairline borders, zero radius. There is no accent colour. Colour belongs only to the three agents, and only on their names and presence dots:

• pico #f64932
• moss #ffba33
• orbit #097fe8