Show HN: Chitty – A macOS native ChatpGPT client with custom assistants

Show HN: Chitty – A macOS native ChatpGPT client with custom assistants(apps.apple.com)

5 points by DerJacques 3 years ago | 3 comments

Chitty is a ChatGPT client for MacOS, built with SwiftUI. Lots of ChatGPT clients are being published every day, but I wanted to focus on two things:

1. I wanted a "real" native ChatGPT client, not just a wrapped web view. Chitty closely resembles an iMessage like interface, which should feel familiar to most users instantly.

2. Chitty should allow you to chat with multiple AI personalities. These AI personalities can be real people (chat with Abraham Lincoln about his life), or made up.

The app comes pre-loaded with a handful of historic AI personalities that you can interact with: Jane Austen, Alan Turing, and Sojourner Truth. I focused on historic figures instead of more recent personalities, to remedy issues related to IP and plain bad taste. That being said, I also had fun adding some of my own programming heroes, and solving code problems with them. ChatGPT is great at impersonating people, as long as you tell it to stay in character.

I hope you find it helpful. Chitty is free for now, and likely will stay free, but who knows.

DerJacques 3 years ago |

This is my first ever SwiftUI app, and I had a lot of fun building it. I'm usually a web-person, but Electron just didn't feel right for this particular use case. Because I'm using the latest version of SwiftUI, I had to require MacOS 13.1, a fairly recent version of the OS.

I also considered ways to not require users to enter their own OpenAI API key. For friends and family I would be happy to just bake my own key into the app (or proxy calls through my own API), but I don't see how that would be feasible on a larger scale, while remaining free.

I'm here to answer comments, in case someone has questions!

bakioka 3 years ago |

What a name.

DerJacques 3 years ago | |

Haha, I try to not be too serious about it all. Lots of stuff happening in this space. I went back and forth on the name quite a bit, and in the end I opted for this tongue-in-cheek but short and potentially memorable name.