Cai
Hi HN, Cai runs actions on your selection via ⌥C, pick an action (AI, shell, GitHub issue, Linear ticket), done. Bundled local model (MLX Community), create custom actions with prompts, scripts and more. Free, MIT. Built after my Raycast extension sat in review queue for 3+ months. Wanted no typing, no app switching, no cloud. Repo: https://github.com/cai-layer/cai Demo: https://youtu.be/LH2MYNQ_wsk
Cai launched on April 22, 2026 with 179 votes, #161 of 21,248 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
What it does
Press ⌥C on anything to run smart actions: AI prompts, shell scripts, GitHub issues, Linear tickets, or send results anywhere... All one keystroke away. Bring your own brain: bundled Ministral 3B for zero-setup local AI, any HuggingFace MLX model for Apple Silicon speed, or connect Ollama, LM Studio, Apple Intelligence, or OpenRouter. Free, MIT licensed. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.
Free, open-source AI action layer for macOS. Select anything, press ⌥C, run AI actions, scripts, and chains. Built by your agent, approved by you, run locally.
Fire-and-forget actions, built by your agent or by you. Run them anywhere with ⌥C . Cai is a free, open-source AI action layer for macOS. Select any text or image, press ⌥C , and instantly run custom actions: AI prompts, terminal scripts, URL shortcuts, summaries, translations, OCR, GitHub issues, Linear tickets. Cai is also an MCP server: coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex can author actions over MCP. The agent can only propose. Every action waits for your approval as a reviewable diff, then runs locally from ⌥C with no agent and no tokens involved. Save chains of actions: pipe a selection through an AI prompt, a script, and a destination (Slack, webhook, AppleScript, Apple…from getcai.app
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I made an app to use local AI as daily driver2024 · recurse.chat · ▲637Hi 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.…
Open-source macOS AI copilot using vision and voice2023 · github.com · ▲430Heeey! I built a macOS copilot that has been useful to me, so I open sourced it in case others would find it useful too. It's pretty simple: - Use a keyboard shortcut to take a screenshot of your active macOS window and start recording the microphone. - Speak your question, then press the keyboard shortcut again to send your question + screenshot off to OpenAI Vision - The Vision response is presented in-context/overlayed over the active window, and spoken to you as audio. - The app keeps running in the background, only taking a screenshot/listening when activated by keyboard…
- DADeltix – AI Driven TestingAug 2026 · app.deltix.ai · ▲54
Write a task in plain English. An AI agent runs it on a simulator on your Mac and tells you if a real user could complete it. Save the successful run as a regression check you can replay later.
I built a free CharacterAI that runs locallyMar 2026 · github.com · ▲8CharacterAI has over 20M active users and lets people talk to AI voice clones. I built a local alternative that clones any voice with <10s of audio and can talk fluently in over 10 languages, and runs locally on your Macbook or Mac mini. The voice pipeline currently supports MLX on any M1 through M5 chip. I used Whisper-Turbo for STT, Qwen3.5-9B-4bit for the LLM and Qwen3-TTS-0.6B-4bit for TTS. The repo also has a Websocket Transport to add these voices to devices powered by the ESP32 via secure websockets.
Companion2025 · aioscompanion.com · ▲20AI that actually controls your Windows/Mac desktop - clicks, types, automates workflows across any application. Native OS integration, not cloud APIs. Built this because I was tired of AI that could only chat. Free tier (Gemini) + paid tier (Claude) for reliable automation. The AI can automate complex workflows, manage files/emails, control browsers and native apps. Just launched 2 weeks ago. What workflows would you want automated?
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the category →
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Source: Product Hunt launch ↗
Launched alongside, April 2026
the whole month →
- AG
Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are
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Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
AI · Apr 2026 · github.com
I made a laptop stand out of solid concrete, in the style of brutalist architecture, with themes of urbex and urban decay
Life & fun · Apr 2026 · sam-burns.com
With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories. There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/ If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.
AI · Apr 2026 · text.blogosphere.app