Your Mac does the work. You just aren't there.
AI Box turns the Mac on your desk into an AI workstation — agentic chat, a writing studio, image generation and a real terminal — then hands you the controls on your phone. The machine does the work. The keys never leave it.
Universal — Apple Silicon & Intel · Signed & notarized · macOS 10.15+
This is a public beta. It's stable enough that I use it for my own work every day, and free while it's in testing. What I want back is what broke, what confused you, and what you wish it did — open an issue or email me.
Powerful AI is either in someone else's cloud, or chained to your desk
Cloud tools see everything
Local tools stop at the desk
AI Box does both
Four tabs down the left. This is what each one does.
They share one window, one model picker and one workspace — so a passage you wrote can be illustrated, and a file the agent touched is the same file your terminal is sitting in.
An agent with hands, not a chat box
Ask it to build something, fix something or explain something, and turn on Agent to let it act on the machine rather than just describe what you should do.
- Reads and edits files, searches a codebase, runs shell commands, fetches pages
- Every destructive step shows a diff and asks first
- Approval is raised on the Mac, even when the request came from your phone
A manuscript editor that finishes your sentence
A proper writing surface rather than a chat transcript — your document stays the document, and the AI works inside it. No draft is ever really gone.
- Continue a passage mid-sentence, or proofread a selection and accept corrections one at a time
- Modes for fiction, business, marketing and academic work
- Chapter and scene outline, word goals, and version history on disk
Generation on your own GPU
Nothing is uploaded to be rendered. The models run on the machine under your desk, which is also the machine holding the manuscript they are illustrating.
- A managed ComfyUI the app installs for you — no Python setup
- Illustrate a scene straight from the passage you have selected in Write
- Characters kept visually consistent between images
A real terminal, not a command box
The tab that makes the phone useful: a genuine shell on your Mac, in your pocket, with the same session waiting when you sit back down.
- An actual PTY — vim, top and claude all behave normally
- xterm.js on the front, Rust PTY sessions behind it
- Reachable from the sofa, or from a train
Three steps, and one of them is optional
- 01
Install it
Download the
.dmgand drag it across. It's signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens like any other app — no right-click-to-open dance. It updates itself from then on. - 02
Point it at a model
Paste an OpenRouter key to use frontier models, or install a local one through Ollama from inside the app and run entirely offline. Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works too. Keys go into the macOS Keychain, never a config file.
- 03
Pair your phone — optional
Scan a QR code. Your phone opens the same app over your home network and installs to the home screen.
At home it just works. Away from home takes one more app.
AI Box never puts your Mac on the public internet, so how you reach it depends on where you are. Both routes carry the same pairing token, and neither opens a port to the world.
On your own network — nothing to install
Anywhere else — add Tailscale
Leave the Mac awake
One codebase, two transports
Every capability is written once against a transport layer that resolves at runtime to either Tauri IPC or an HTTP + WebSocket connection. That is why the phone isn't a cut-down companion app — it is the same app.
| Shell | Tauri 2 — a Rust backend with the system WebView. ~17 MB installed, not a bundled browser. |
|---|---|
| Interface | React 19 + TypeScript. TipTap/ProseMirror for the editor, xterm.js for the terminal. |
| Backend | Rust: provider streaming with server-side cancellation, PTY sessions, filesystem tools behind a path guard. |
| Remote | An axum HTTP + WebSocket server on the Mac serving the same bundle to the phone. Bearer auth, constant-time comparison, fails closed. |
| Sync | Item-level merge with tombstones. Edit the same document on both devices and neither side loses work. |
| Distribution | Universal binary, Developer ID signed, Apple-notarized, with minisign-verified auto-updates. |
An agent with real access needs real limits
- Your API key never leaves the Mac. The phone gets a placeholder so its interface knows a key exists; the Mac injects the real one when the request goes out.
- File access is jailed to a workspace folder you choose, with
..traversal and symlink escapes rejected in Rust, not in the interface. - Credentials are off-limits, always.
~/.ssh,~/.aws, keychains, shell startup files and LaunchAgents are refused outright — and turning off approval prompts does not turn this off. - The Mac approves, not the phone. A remote request to write a file or run a command raises a prompt with a diff on the desktop.
- Your words stay yours. Drafts are snapshotted to disk continuously, restorable, and exportable to a folder you own. With a local model, nothing leaves the machine at all.
Take it for a run, then tell me what broke
AI Box is free during beta and never hosts your content or pays for inference — you choose the model and the account it bills to.
Designed and built by GW‑InTech — available for work.