Welcome to Hothouse

⚠️ Content Advisory: this application is intended for adults (18+) only.
It can generate sexually explicit content, nudity, and mature themes. By installing, using, or contributing to Hothouse you confirm you are of legal age in your jurisdiction.

What is Hothouse?
Hothouse is an open-source, local-first adult AI dating sandbox.It’s built to look and feel like a simple swipe-based dating app. I’m sure you know the type.Everything about your experience is fully customizable: prompts, models, possible character traits (tags), your own profile, whether AI characters gossip about you, whether they can match with each other, how likely they are to leave you on read, how they’ll react to you leaving them on read, how difficult it is to get a match with them, everything.What do I need to set up Hothouse?
Not much. You will need:(1) The app.
It will install its dependencies.(2) A link to a LLM provider of your choosing.
The model should be vision-capable and pretty strong, but cheap enough that you don’t mind paying for tens of thousands of output tokens (and more input tokens) per character generation cycle. Chatting itself is relatively cheap but portrait vision is enabled by default so characters stay consistent. And there are a lot of background tasks that are run through LLMs.If you’re not running locally, I recommend GLM 5.3 Flash through Openrouter to get started as it’s pretty cheap (this app can consume quite a few tokens). In playing around with this app during testing, I used it a lot, as you might imagine, and I don’t think I spent more than like 2 bucks. Your mileage may vary! If you use a frontier model, you might find that you’re handing out 5 dollar bills every couple hours.Hothouse has extensive customization options for using multiple LLMs for different tasks. You may find that you want to use a faster/more powerful model for important tasks like Character Generation and Character Bio Writing.(3) Some images that you want characters to pick from as their profile images.
Yes, characters really do pick their own images from the options you upload.The app ships with some starter characters, but if you generate any characters beyond that (one of the central features of the app), you’ll want to upload images.You can upload images to public/portrait-library (or through the app in the Manager tab). Each time you upload images, you must scan the image library and run the image processor. You can find these tools in the Manager Tab in the app.I recommend finding a couple dozen images, maybe spend some time going through civitai, and dropping them in the app. You can upload as many images as you want! By default, a character will see tagged descriptions of 40 random images at a time and choose from them.Advanced users: I started playing around with image gen links, and if you’re a comfyui user there should be the resources in the app as it exists now to have characters generate their own images if you spend some time exploring the options and building a custom workflow. This isn't tested as I'm not very familiar with comfyui and image gen in general. For now, I expect most users will just upload a library of high-quality images of their choosing.Why I started this project:
I really didn’t like the way a lot of the online AI dating-app-like experiences are aggressively and predatorily monetized. And a lot of them don’t even feel like dating apps! You don't pick from a library of characters when you're swiping on a dating app. Of course, there are always open-source frontends like SillyTavern, which are a lot of fun to play around with if you have a particular character you know you want to chat with, but I wanted to create an app with the feel of a dating app, where you’re swiping on profiles, get the thrill of wondering if they'll swipe back, messaging strangers for the first time, getting messages–the app/context would stay the same while the characters would be generated based on how you interacted with previous characters. This is all in the app as of release!I also wanted a simple way for characters to feel like they had a bit of depth and agency, so I built a couple systems where the characters can interact with the world, each other, and react to your choices: you’ll develop a reputation if you’re not careful…Everything in the app is fully customizable–that’s right, every prompt and parameter. Not to mention that the whole project is completely open-source. So go ahead and play around! Hopefully you’ll have as much fun with it as I have.Links
Github
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