Cai
Press ⌥C on anything to run smart actions, locally
187 followers
Press ⌥C on anything to run smart actions, locally
187 followers
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.
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Greetings again, PH 👋
Cai is my attempt to escape the "⌘Tab fatigue" for everyday tasks (eg. copy something → ⌘Tab to Claude → paste, wait, follow-up → ⌘Tab back, paste, copy → ⌘Tab to browser…) Probably 30+ times a day?
I originally tried shipping it as a Raycast extension, but it's been sitting in their review queue ever since, so I decided to build Cai natively from scratch with simplicity, privacy and ownership in mind.
As models keep improving and commoditising, I strongly believe local and privacy-first is the way forward (my Gmail from 2005 is probably in some model's weights now, writing bad poetry to strangers.). Cai aims to become the assistant you own, that runs on your Mac and you never have to think twice about what data you're feeding it.
Cai is free, MIT licensed, and a few amazing people are already helping with ideas and code (massive thanks for your support! 🙏). Everything in the demo runs 100% on your Mac.
Roast it in the thread, I'll be around all day.
Much love,
Asís
@soyasis amazing, it makes my workflow so much smoother not having to jump back and forth between all different apps I have opened :) I also just found out that there are community extensions - love it!
Thanks for the early testing @phiele 🙏
@soyasis Is this working on Windows as well?If yes what are the shortcuts there and are they customizable?
@shantanu_singh_parihar Unfortunately no in scope atm, but if we get enough interest we'd be happy to consider :)
@soyasis Sounds like a great tool! Very interesting. Just heads up, I think the preview video sound is mixed up around 2:48-3:15
@kacper_gasior Thanks for the heads-up! Recorded the video very late at night... :D
@kacper_gasior Check this version instead: https://youtu.be/LH2MYNQ_wsk
@soyasis Perfect ;)
Thanks for the feedback @olegivanov247, I agree with what you say. I chose ⌥C as we all use ⌘C for copy-paste, so it should be a little easier to remember, but you can always change the hotkey. And yes, local should really be the focus. Apple Intelligence is the one with least footprint, and MLX has considerable less than llama.cpp as well, there are some interesting comparison online, but I haven't done much experimenting myself.
Just started reviewing the tool.
I am a keyboard type of user. Perhaps a silly comment.
Once you press ⌥C I understand that the shortcut ⌘1 , ⌘2 is common in other apps. Have you considered using ⌥1 ⌥2 ....
Wow this is really really cool - is this open source - this is what software should be minimal and simple and does what it has to do.
@dhruba_patra thanks for the kind words! Agree, simplicity is king! 👑
⌥C as the trigger right next to ⌘C is a subtle muscle-memory hack — Raycast chose ⌘Space for a reason but this lands differently. Local-first + MIT-licensed + zero telemetry is the trifecta most "AI assistant" apps silently violate. Curious how Cai handles shared workflows when users want to sync custom actions across their Macs without signing in.
Thanks for the feedback @mcarmonas! Still not clear how we'll be handling this, my gut instinct wants to avoid cloud + account creation (also will add costs on my side), so probably a simple JSON file or directory users can add to a private repo would be a good start. Do you have any suggestions or ideas? Would love to hear them :)
This looks sharp. What do you think will surprise people most once they actually use it?
@iampascio The minimalism and customization aspect are key, you can create your own actions to fit your workflow (scripts, prompts, destinations...) and even trigger fire-and-forget agents that run tasks in the background while you focus on something else. Curious what you think!
@soyasis Congratulations. And happy product launch.
Thanks for the support @huisong_li 🙌