Amazingly generous that it’s open source. Let’s hope the author can keep building it, but if they need to fund their existence there is precedent - lots of folks pay for Superwhisper. People pay for quality software.
In a past tech cycle Apple might’ve hired the author, acquired the IP and lovingly stewarded the work into a bundled OS app. Not something to hope for lately. So just going to hope the app lives for years to come and keeps improving the whole way.
antonkar 3 hours ago [-]
Yep, I think the guy who’ll make the GUI for LLMs is the next Jobs/Gates/Musk and Nobel Prize Winner (I think it’ll solve alignment by having millions of eyes on the internals of LLMs), because computers became popular only after the OS with a GUI appeared. I just started ASK HN to let people and me share their AI safety ideas, both crazy and not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43332593
kridsdale1 2 hours ago [-]
What you describe seems to be OpenAI’s “moat”. They currently are the farthest ahead in app UX for nontechnical users and in Brand Recognition. It doesn’t matter if they are 10% behind Anthropic in frontier model quality if Claude For Mac is a shitty Electron app.
antonkar 54 minutes ago [-]
I miscommunicated( I meant new 3D game-like UIs. There can be a whole new OS full apps that represent multimodal LLMs in human-familiar ways. All the UI now is what I consider commandline-like. They are like a strict librarian that only spits quotes, no one allows you to truly enter the library. We need better 3D and even “4D” long exposure photo like UIs
brulard 53 minutes ago [-]
Claude for Mac works quite well for me, and now with these MCP servers looking better than ever. And regarding electron - I have seen (and created for myself) awesome apps that would never existed without it.
DrBenCarson 55 minutes ago [-]
The ideal UX isn’t a secret: audio with AR for context
I’m bullish on an AirPods-with-cameras experience
piyuv 1 hours ago [-]
I’ve read the same thing about cryptocurrencies for so long (it needs a proper GUI to take off)
antonkar 53 minutes ago [-]
I miscommunicated( I meant new 3D game-like UIs. There can be a whole new OS full apps that represent multimodal LLMs in human-familiar ways. All the UI now is what I consider commandline-like. They are like a strict librarian that only spits quotes, no one allows you to truly enter the library. We need better 3D and even “4D” long exposure photo like UIs
piyuv 50 minutes ago [-]
I got what you mean. People have said cryptocurrencies are one UX revolution away from mainstream adoption since its inception. The reality was/is, it’s a solution in search of a problem.
antonkar 15 minutes ago [-]
Who said it and how it relates to what I wrote? You’re majorly straw-manning what I proposed
mentalgear 14 minutes ago [-]
Looks great, kudos for making it open-source! Yet as with any app that has access to my local file system, what instantly comes to mind is "narrow permissions" / principle of least permissions.
It'd be great if the app would only have read access to my files, not full disk permission.
As an end-user, I'm highly concerned that files might get deleted or data shared via the internet.
So ideally, Sidekick would have only "read" permissions and no internet access. (This applies really to any app with full disk read access).
Also: why does it say Mac Silicon required?
I can run Llama.cpp and Ollama on my intel mac.
BestHackerOnHN 4 minutes ago [-]
Comments like this are what turn me off about this website. Entitled, much?
abroadwin 3 hours ago [-]
Neat. It would be nice to provide an option to use an API endpoint without downloading an additional local model. I have several models downloaded via ollama and would prefer to use them without additional space being taken up by the default model.
Terretta 1 hours ago [-]
From the README:
Optionally, offload generation to speed up generation while extending the battery life of your MacBook.
Screenshot shows example, mentions OpenAI and gpt-4o.
unshavedyak 3 hours ago [-]
Looks super neat!
Somewhat related, one issue i have with projects like these is it appears like everyone is bundling the UX/App with the core ... pardon my ignorance, "LLM App interface". Eg We have a lot of abstractions for LLMs themselves such as Llama.cpp, but it feels like we lack abstractions for things like what Claude Code does, or perhaps this RAG impl, or whatever.
Ie these days it seems like a lot of the magic in a quality implementation is built on top of a good LLM. A secondary layer which is just as important as the LLM itself. The prompt engineering, etc.
Are there any attempts to generalize this? Is it even possible? Feels like i keep seeing a lot of good ideas which get locked behind an app wall and no ability to switch them out. We've got tons of options to abstract the LLMs themselves, but i've not seen anything which tackles this (but i've also not been looking).
Does it exist? Does this area have a name?
Terretta 1 hours ago [-]
On MacOS, look at things like Msty.app (and of course LM Studio)?
They are pluggable across more than just LLM itself.
bastardoperator 1 hours ago [-]
I went with msty because I didnt want to run docker and it's been rock solid for my needs.
atonse 2 hours ago [-]
When I bought my new MBP, I was wondering whether to just upgrade the memory to 48GB thinking that it will become more likely that I will run local models in the next 3-4 year cycle of this laptop. So I took the leap and just upgraded the memory.
Hoping that these kinds of tools will run well in these scenarios.
pzo 4 hours ago [-]
some other alternatives (a little more mature / feature rich):
What differentiates this from Open WebUI? How did you design the RAG pipeline?
I had a project in the past where I had hundreds of PDF / HTML files of industry safety and fatality reports which I was hoping to simply "throw in" and use with Open WebUI, but I found it wasn't effective at this even in RAG mode. I wanted to ask it questions like "How many fatalities occurred in 2020 that involved heavy machinery?", but it wasn't able to provide such broad aggregate data.
phren0logy 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is a fundamental issue with naive RAG implementations: they aren't accurate enough for pretty much anything
kridsdale1 2 hours ago [-]
Ultimately, the quality of OCR on PDF is where we are bottlenecked as an industry. And not just in text characters but understanding and feeding to the LLM structured object relationships as we see in tables and graphs. Intuitive for a human, very error prone for RAG.
As a suggestion to the author, please try to make it verifiably local only with an easy to set option.
nclements 49 minutes ago [-]
Tavily search is an option, disabled by default.
Maybe the author could make a note of that in the README.
AnonC 4 hours ago [-]
Looks nice, and I greatly appreciate the local only or local first mode.
The readme says:
> Give the LLM access to your folders, files and websites with just 1 click, allowing them to reply with context.
…
> Context aware. Aware of your files, folders and content on the web.
Am I right in assuming that this works only with local text files and that it cannot integrate with data sources in Apple’s apps such as Notes, Reminders, etc.? It could be a great competitor to Apple Intelligence if it could integrate with apps that primarily store textual information (but unfortunately in their own proprietary data formats on disk and with sandboxing adding another barrier).
Can it use and search PDFs, RTF files and other formats as “experts”?
Someone 4 hours ago [-]
> Am I right in assuming that this works only with local text files
One of the screen shots shows a .xlsx in the “Temporary Resources” area.
Also: I haven’t checked, but for a “Local-first” app, I would expect it to leverage Spotlight text importers from the OS, and run something like
mdimport -t -d3 *file*
on files it can’t natively process.
kridsdale1 1 hours ago [-]
The Apple data you mention has APIs for feeding them in to LLMs if you wish. Someone just has to write it.
(I wrote one of those Apple API SDKs)
rubymamis 6 hours ago [-]
Some interesting features. I'm working on similar native app with Qt so it will support Linux, macOS and Windows out of the box. I might open source it as well.
Was this the MS-DOS TSR app that kept running in the background and you could invoke at any time? Fond memories!
noufalibrahim 24 minutes ago [-]
I was going to say the same thing. It had so many cool tools. A calculator, ascii chart, notepad, calendar. And the whole idea of a tsr opened a door in my head which hadn't seen multiple programs running at the same time till then.
jasonjmcghee 3 hours ago [-]
I thought of the phone with the spinning screen from the mid 2000s.
whoitsjustme 27 minutes ago [-]
Does it support MCP?
typeiierror 4 hours ago [-]
I've been looking for something like this to query / interface with the mountain of home appliance manuals I've hung onto as PDFs - use case being that instead of having to fish out and read a manual once something breaks, I can just chat with the corpus to quickly find what I need to fix something. Will give it a shot!
thomasfl 2 hours ago [-]
This needs 164 MB of disk space. Not to bad. Thank you to the author for this.
Telemakhos 50 minutes ago [-]
That's just the binary. It needs at least another order of magnitude beyond that to download the model.
delijati 5 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know if there is something like this or https://github.com/kevinhermawan/Ollamac for linux ... both are build with swift and swift also supports linux!?
Matl 5 hours ago [-]
Desktop-wise there's https://msty.app which is rather good but not open source. I'm using OpenWeb UI [1] with a desktop shortcut but that's a web app.
Very cool, trying it out, I'm unable to make it do a search tho, on the experts it says it's deactivated on the settings but I couldn't find a setting for it, maybe it's model dependent and the default model can't do it?
AutoAPI 7 hours ago [-]
An option to use a local LLM on network without needing to download the 2GB "default model" would be great
Nice, just needs a computer/browser use mode and thinking/agent mode. e.g. "Test this web app for me. Try creating a new account and starting a new order" etc.
dev213 4 hours ago [-]
looks like an awesome tool!
I just found it funny that in code interpreter demo, javascript is used to evaluate mathematical problems (especially the float comparison)
sansieation 6 hours ago [-]
Why no MLX?
TheMagicHorsey 49 minutes ago [-]
I think it uses Llama.cpp, which doesn't support MLX.
Trying to put this through its paces, I first set out to build my own local binary (because why not, and also because code-reading is fun when you've got your own local build) ..
But I get this far:
/Users/aa-jv/Development/InterestingProjects/Sidekick/Sidekick/Logic/View Controllers/Tools/Slide Studio/Resources/bin/marp: No such file or directory
It seems there is a hand-built binary resource missing from the repo - did anyone else do a build yet, and get past this step?
Yeah, I've manually copied that binary into place from the marp-cli package in homebrew and now the build proceeds .. continuing as I type .. lets see what happens.
I'm immediately suspicious of such binary resources, however.
nottorp 7 hours ago [-]
> Image generation is availible on macOS 15.2 or above, and requires Apple Intelligence.
... so image generation is not fully offline?
This tool looks like it could be worth a try to me, but only if I'm sure I can run it into a mode that's fully offline.
happyopossum 42 minutes ago [-]
Apple Intelligence image generation is fully offline
greggsy 6 hours ago [-]
Some features use private cloud, but it's pretty decent in terms of security and privacy.
I doubt my customer - on whose proprietary code I want to try running LLMs - cares :)
Or to rephrase: would you go to court with the contents of that link as evidence that you haven't inadvertently published someone else's proprietary data in some external database?
argsnd 7 hours ago [-]
isn't apple intelligence image generation fully offline?
nottorp 6 hours ago [-]
I don't know, I'm asking.
Only want it for some code so it looks like it can be fully offline, but it's worth being paranoid about it.
aneutron 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
5 hours ago [-]
mritchie712 7 hours ago [-]
I don't think Apple has missed out on much (yet). The best LLM's (e.g. gpt4o, sonnet 3.7) are no where near being able to run locally and still make mistakes.
Some LLMs can run locally, but are brutally slow with small context windows.
Apple is likely waiting until you can run a really good model on device (i.e. iOS), which makes sense to me. It's not like they're losing customers over this right now.
pantulis 6 hours ago [-]
They are playing the long game, which is what has always been: wait until the silicon enables that for most users. The Apple Silicon track record suggests that... wait a couple of years and we'll get M3-Ultra-class capabilities in all of Apple devices. Some day the lowest bar will be above running state of the art LLMs on device.
aneutron 6 hours ago [-]
All they have to show is incremental improvements over Siri. For that, Quantized models are more than enough in my opinion.
Wowfunhappy 6 hours ago [-]
Siri hasn't run on device for most of its existence. It's only in the last few years that Apple suddenly decided it was a priority.
cpursley 6 hours ago [-]
Sonnet 3.7 best? That thing is a dumpster fire. Totally useless vs 3.5.
kossTKR 7 hours ago [-]
Just checked some Genmojis created on reddit, wow, i don't know how that got approved. I'm all for creativity and freedom but it's 100% not apples brand.
And they just postponed AI-Siri to 2026 after promising it for iPhone 16.
I seriously don't get how it can be that hard. Small model trained on various app API's, a checker model that double checks, an approve this action button. Not that hard.
0xferruccio 5 hours ago [-]
Really cool! I hope they'll roll out MCP support so that we can add support for it in our MCP app store (https://github.com/fleuristes/fleur)
Right now only code editors and Claude support MCPs, but we'd love to see more clients like Sidekick
Rendered at 18:04:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Amazingly generous that it’s open source. Let’s hope the author can keep building it, but if they need to fund their existence there is precedent - lots of folks pay for Superwhisper. People pay for quality software.
In a past tech cycle Apple might’ve hired the author, acquired the IP and lovingly stewarded the work into a bundled OS app. Not something to hope for lately. So just going to hope the app lives for years to come and keeps improving the whole way.
I’m bullish on an AirPods-with-cameras experience
It'd be great if the app would only have read access to my files, not full disk permission.
As an end-user, I'm highly concerned that files might get deleted or data shared via the internet.
So ideally, Sidekick would have only "read" permissions and no internet access. (This applies really to any app with full disk read access).
Also: why does it say Mac Silicon required? I can run Llama.cpp and Ollama on my intel mac.
Optionally, offload generation to speed up generation while extending the battery life of your MacBook.
Screenshot shows example, mentions OpenAI and gpt-4o.
Somewhat related, one issue i have with projects like these is it appears like everyone is bundling the UX/App with the core ... pardon my ignorance, "LLM App interface". Eg We have a lot of abstractions for LLMs themselves such as Llama.cpp, but it feels like we lack abstractions for things like what Claude Code does, or perhaps this RAG impl, or whatever.
Ie these days it seems like a lot of the magic in a quality implementation is built on top of a good LLM. A secondary layer which is just as important as the LLM itself. The prompt engineering, etc.
Are there any attempts to generalize this? Is it even possible? Feels like i keep seeing a lot of good ideas which get locked behind an app wall and no ability to switch them out. We've got tons of options to abstract the LLMs themselves, but i've not seen anything which tackles this (but i've also not been looking).
Does it exist? Does this area have a name?
They are pluggable across more than just LLM itself.
Hoping that these kinds of tools will run well in these scenarios.
anythingllm https://github.com/Mintplex-Labs/anything-llm
openwebui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
lmstudio https://lmstudio.ai/
I had a project in the past where I had hundreds of PDF / HTML files of industry safety and fatality reports which I was hoping to simply "throw in" and use with Open WebUI, but I found it wasn't effective at this even in RAG mode. I wanted to ask it questions like "How many fatalities occurred in 2020 that involved heavy machinery?", but it wasn't able to provide such broad aggregate data.
As a suggestion to the author, please try to make it verifiably local only with an easy to set option.
Maybe the author could make a note of that in the README.
The readme says:
> Give the LLM access to your folders, files and websites with just 1 click, allowing them to reply with context.
…
> Context aware. Aware of your files, folders and content on the web.
Am I right in assuming that this works only with local text files and that it cannot integrate with data sources in Apple’s apps such as Notes, Reminders, etc.? It could be a great competitor to Apple Intelligence if it could integrate with apps that primarily store textual information (but unfortunately in their own proprietary data formats on disk and with sandboxing adding another barrier).
Can it use and search PDFs, RTF files and other formats as “experts”?
One of the screen shots shows a .xlsx in the “Temporary Resources” area.
Also: I haven’t checked, but for a “Local-first” app, I would expect it to leverage Spotlight text importers from the OS, and run something like
on files it can’t natively process.(I wrote one of those Apple API SDKs)
https://www.get-vox.com
1 - https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
But I get this far:
/Users/aa-jv/Development/InterestingProjects/Sidekick/Sidekick/Logic/View Controllers/Tools/Slide Studio/Resources/bin/marp: No such file or directory
It seems there is a hand-built binary resource missing from the repo - did anyone else do a build yet, and get past this step?
I'm immediately suspicious of such binary resources, however.
... so image generation is not fully offline?
This tool looks like it could be worth a try to me, but only if I'm sure I can run it into a mode that's fully offline.
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
The only safe option is if it's guaranteed to not leave my machine, so for this app, to disable anything that has a chance of exfiltrating data.
https://security.apple.com/blog/pcc-security-research/
Or to rephrase: would you go to court with the contents of that link as evidence that you haven't inadvertently published someone else's proprietary data in some external database?
Only want it for some code so it looks like it can be fully offline, but it's worth being paranoid about it.
Some LLMs can run locally, but are brutally slow with small context windows.
Apple is likely waiting until you can run a really good model on device (i.e. iOS), which makes sense to me. It's not like they're losing customers over this right now.
And they just postponed AI-Siri to 2026 after promising it for iPhone 16. I seriously don't get how it can be that hard. Small model trained on various app API's, a checker model that double checks, an approve this action button. Not that hard.
Right now only code editors and Claude support MCPs, but we'd love to see more clients like Sidekick