PAI on Windows, anybody?

[stephtara]

I'm a mac user who has been excitedly getting started with PAI about a week ago. Of course I am telling everybody about it and want to help my less-techy-but-interested friends and family get on board. They are not all mac users.
I've read here and there that PAI can run on Windows, and I'd love to know more. Is there a guide somewhere? If there isn't, maybe somebody who went through the setup could ask their DA to produce a first draft of one? 😇

[acq23]

Officially it can't, so your less-techy-but-interested friends are out of the game.
#853

Someone who tried with WLS
#922

Less-techy-but-interested friends should move out from Windows for personal use nowdays :) .

Anyway, assuming they are not able to install a new hard drive on the PC/laptop, if really interested they may choose between:

• dual-boot their machine (easy, but requires a bit of caution, it depends on less-techyness degree...) or
• use an external drive where Linux is installed with UEFI/EFI (easiest and with no implication on their present environment).

Techy or not, I strongly disadvise to run any AI assistant in your personal PC/laptop without isolation (VM or other).
Better solution: give it it's own machine.

My 2 cents.

Best regards

[umbra-codex]

I'm using PAI on Windows via WSL. I think that's the best option.

[SzyslaK]

I'm running the Windows fork here - https://github.com/chrisglick/Personal_AI_Infrastructure_Windows
I grabbed the original installation instructions from this comment

[arpleasa]

I use it on linux at home, but for work I created a windows version that only runs PAI when you start claude from that stand-alone folder. That way I can use claude as PAI, but also when working on other coding projects I don't want all that overhead.

[chrisglick]

I've been successfully running PAI on windows since February. It takes maybe an hour or two more to get set-up, and that entire time is just telling Claude code what's broken about the local install and to fix it. The links @SzyslaK posted above are the guides for installing 4.0.x versions exactly as you suggested @stephtara. Asking Claude Code to follow those guides for a new Windows user should make the install much, much easier.

My branch is only up to version 4.0.3, as v5.0.0 just released today. I've just asked my DA to start evaluating PAI 5.0.0 and the Claude Code updates to figure out the best path forward for PAI on windows. I know Claude Code has been working a lot on Windows features, like native Powershell. Its looks like some of the new PAI 5 features have MacOS only calls.

But I'm running PAI version, like, 2.5 on my work laptop and 4.0.3 on my personal laptop, and they both work GREAT. So I wouldn't be too FOMO on not getting the latest PAI on Windows. Even version 2.5 is a huge upgrade from vanilla Claude Code.