Alternatives
Products that do what GPT–LLM native macOS app with time travel, versioning, search does
Hey everyone! I made a Mac app for exploring large language models. It’s fast, small, has a tiny memory footprint. It’s immutable by design with both immediate time travel and automatic versioning as foundational elements. The app is written in Swift and a bit of Rust for the tokenizer. I used SwiftUI for structure and animations and Cocoa for advanced behavior. All storage is SQLite and local-only. You can go through the database as needed and backup it as well. The app has support for variants, which is the `n` parameter in the OpenAI chat completion API—equivalent to the drafts feature in…
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Hi Hackers, Excited to share a macOS app I've been working on: https://recurse.chat/ for chatting with local AI. While it's amazing that you can run AI models locally quite easily these days (through llama.cpp / llamafile / ollama / llm CLI etc.), I missed feature complete chat interfaces. Tools like LMStudio are super powerful, but there's a learning curve to it. I'd like to hit a middleground of simplicity and customizability for advanced users. Here's what separates RecurseChat out from similar apps: - UX designed for you to use local AI as a daily driver.…
2024 · recurse.chat
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We built SwiftAI, an open-source Swift library that lets you use Apple’s on-device LLMs when available (Apple opened access in June), and fall back to a cloud model when they aren’t available — all without duplicating code. SwiftAI gives you: - A single, model-agnostic API - An agent/tool loop - Strongly-typed structured outputs - Optional chat state Backstory: We started experimenting with Apple’s local models because they’re free (no API calls), private, and work offline. The problem: not all devices support them (older iPhones, Apple Intelligence disabled, low battery, etc.). That…
2025 · github.com
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Hi HN A few folks and I have been working on this project for a couple weeks now. After previously working on the Docker project for a number of years (both on the container runtime and image registry side), the recent rise in open source language models made us think something similar needed to exist for large language models too. While not exactly the same as running linux containers, running LLMs shares quite a few of the same challenges. There are "base layers" (e.g. models like Llama 2), specific configuration to run correctly (parameters, temperature, context window sizes etc). There's…
2023 · github.com
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I keep running in the same problem of each AI app “remembers” me in its own silo. ChatGPT knows my project details, Cursor forgets them, Claude starts from zero… so I end up re-explaining myself dozens of times a day across these apps. The deeper problem 1. Not portable – context is vendor-locked; nothing travels across tools. 2. Not relational – most memory systems store only the latest fact (“sticky notes”) with no history or provenance. 3. Not yours – your AI memory is sensitive first-party data, yet you have no control over where it lives or how it’s queried. Demo video:…
2025 · github.com
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This lets you talk to local LLMs in Apple Notes. I saw Obsidian Ollama (https://github.com/hinterdupfinger/obsidian-ollama) and thought it was handy, but I'm too lazy to migrate away from the Apple ecosystem, so I quickly hacked this together. I tend to use Notes as a scratchpad for prompts, so it's nice to do some quick inference without leaving the app. Notes doesn't really support plugins so I'm using the macOS accessibility API for reading selections and then stream responses using the clipboard (not ideal but it works).
2024 · smallest.app
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Hello HN, I've been working on this project for a while, and it has been in an "open" beta for some time. I finally believe it's ready for its first release. I hope you like it. Here are some potential questions that may arise: 1. How does it compare to LM Studio? It's likely that if you're already using LM Studio, you'll continue to do so. This project is designed to be more user-friendly. 2. Is it open-source? No, it is not. 3. Does it use any open-source libraries? Yes, it uses llama.cpp and a few others, as indicated in the license information included with the application. 4. Why is not…
2023 · avapls.com
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2023 · swiftgpt.app
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I built LocalGPT over 4 nights as a Rust reimagining of the OpenClaw assistant pattern (markdown-based persistent memory, autonomous heartbeat tasks, skills system). It compiles to a single ~27MB binary — no Node.js, Docker, or Python required. Key features: - Persistent memory via markdown files (MEMORY, HEARTBEAT, SOUL markdown files) — compatible with OpenClaw's format - Full-text search (SQLite FTS5) + semantic search (local embeddings, no API key needed) - Autonomous heartbeat runner that checks tasks on a configurable interval - CLI + web interface + desktop GUI - Multi-provider:…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…
2023
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2023 · github.com
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G'day, HN! I'm one of the maintainers of `llm`. I've been working alongside a trusty group of contributors to bring this project to life, and we're now at a point where we're ready to share it with the world. Large language models (LLMs) are taking the computing world by storm due to their emergent abilities that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks, including translation, summarization, code generation, and even some degree of reasoning. However, the ecosystem around LLMs is still in its infancy, and it can be difficult to get started with these models. `llm` is a one-stop shop for…
2023 · github.com
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Hi folks, My friend Sami and I recently built Vizly, a Mac application that allows anyone to query their databases using plain English. Vizly is built on Llama 2, llama.cpp, and runs fully on-prem (edit: meaning everything is local and your data never leaves your own computer). We are running two Llama models, one for natural language to SQL translation, and another that uses the results from the SQL to render visualizations. That means there are no external APIs and all the AI models are running locally on your MacBook. We tried to make Vizly very easy to share as well. Every Vizly instance…
2023 · vizly.fyi
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Hi HN, we’re Jamie and Matti, co-founders of Twigg. During our master’s we continually found the same pain points cropping up when using LLMs. The linear nature of typical LLMs interfaces - like ChatGPT and Claude - made it really easy to get lost without any easy way to visualise or navigate your project. Worst of all, none of them are well suited for long term projects. We found ourselves spending days using the same chat, only for it to eventually break. Transferring context from one chat to another is also cumbersome. We decided to build something more intuitive to the ways humans think.…
Oct 2025 · twigg.ai
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What I thought would take me weeks in development, took me months, but it's finally out. When ChatGPT API came out in March, my first idea of what to build with it was a spotlight-like app for my mac. The product was ready in a matter of days, but making it useful and sellable to people via some kind of distribution platform was another challenge. Coming from web development, learning how to ship a native app was a trip, but here it is, ready to share with the world. Try it out with the free trial, and I'd appreciate any kind of feedback.
2023 · letsflyai.com
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Hello everyone, I've built a simple macOS app for chatting with models downloaded by Ollama - https://github.com/sheshbabu/Chital It's written in Swift, consumes less memory and loads fast. It has these features: * Support for multiple chat threads * Switch between different models * Markdown support * Automatic chat thread title summarization It's my first time working with Swift and Xcode, and it has been an interesting journey. The performance of the application is a big plus when building native apps, but I wonder if I'll be able to add features like document…
2024 · github.com
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Check out this impressive project that enables running LLMs entirely in the browser using WebGPU. Key features: - Zero token costs, no cloud infrastructure required - Complete data privacy through local processing - Simple 3-line code integration - Built on MLC and Transformer.js The benchmarks show smaller models can effectively handle many common tasks. Currently the project roadmap includes: - No-code AI pipeline builder - Browser-based RAG for document chat - Analytics/logging - Model fine-tuning interface
2025 · github.com
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I’d originally launched my app: Private LLM[1][2] on HN around 10 months ago, with a single RedPajama Chat 3B model. The app has come a long way since then. About a month ago, I added support for 4-bit OmniQuant quantized Mixtral 8x7B Instruct model, and it seems to outperform Q4 models at inference speed and Q8 models at text generation quality, while consuming only about 24GB of RAM[3] at 8k context length. The trick is: a) to use a better quantization algorithm and b) to use unquantized embeddings and the MoE gates (the overhead is quite small). Other notable features include many more…
2024
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