If you don't like Claude Desktop or ChatGPT app you're not alone, here are some of the reasons why I don't like them and decided to built an alternative. Lack of control You can’t control the web-search (depth, breadth and number of sources, image search, video search providers - yeah I like to search stuff on youtube and embed them into canvas) you can’t control how many tokens you’re willing to burn for specific prompt, number of agentic loops, all you got is only “Extended Thinking” toggle local MCP servers is pain to setup, Anthropic/ChatGPT pushes you to use curated Connectors or mess with local with .json configs Privacy there’s no opt-out for keeping your conversation history on their servers, means you’re the product. No way you will ever switch to competitor or any open-source model in their app as they try to lock you in. Missing some native integrations I want to use my own tools: i.e. Apple Maps, Calendar, TradingView charts integration UX/Productivity can’t fork conversation or start a thread for a particular response with mentioning or tagging other model. Everything is getting bloated with 10 new features shipping every week, code, cowork, artifacts, dispatch etc - everything crammed into single app and shoved down your throat, the feature creep is real and reminds me a time when messenger apps started to adding games directly into chat canvas. So I spent the last ~3 months building my own AI client from scratch in SwiftUI. It works with any local model via MLX/Ollama/OpenAI-compatible API, plus cloud providers like OpenRouter. Here's what it can do right now: - Agentic tool calling & web search - Interactive charts (pie, bar, line, TradingView lightweight) - Native Apple Maps embedded in conversations - WeatherKit cards - Screenshot to AI feature - Dynamic sortable tables - Inline markdown editing of model responses - Threaded conversations (Slack-style) - Mentiones "@" switch models mid-conversation - MCP server support Built in SwiftUI, no Electron so your RAM will not blowup with useless stuff. |