Tesseract
the instrument that sees the day
the Companion
the mind that remembers it
Tesseract is a companion that lives on your Mac. Not a chatbot you visit, but a presence that spends the day with you: it notices your notifications, knows which app you're in, reads your calendar, and looks at whatever you show it. Each night it thinks over what the day meant and keeps what mattered, as beliefs you can read, question, and veto. And because all of it runs on your Mac's own chip, nothing you tell it ever leaves the machine.
Six things you can use the minute it is installed. No account, no cloud, nothing sent anywhere. The Companion, further down, is where they are all headed.
01 · dictation · ⌥ space
Hold option and space, talk, let go. Your words land in whatever app is in front of you, in 99 languages, checked for punctuation and misheard words by a small local model. Nothing leaves the Mac.
02 · chat · ⌃ space to talk
Like ChatGPT or Claude, except every word stays on your machine. Type or talk, attach images, let it browse the web, and it remembers what matters across conversations, with sources you can check.
03 · appshot · ⌘ ⌘ together
An Appshot grabs the window you are looking at and drops it into the chat, named after the app it came from. Ask about the error, the thread, the draft, without describing your screen to anyone.
04 · skills · ✦ above the chat
A ✦ button above the chat fans out into skills: proofread, reply, summarize, explain, translate. Tap one and whatever is in the composer, text or an Appshot, goes through it. Add your own as a folder with a markdown file.
05 · voice · fn space
Press fn and space on any selection and hear it in a natural voice generated on your Mac, the words lighting up as they are spoken. Describe the voice you want in plain words.
06 · the server · for developers
Turn on the server and Tesseract answers on localhost as an OpenAI-compatible API. Works with Pi, Claude Code, OpenCode, or any AI harness. Same models, same machine.
99
languages it understands when you speak
16 GB
of memory is all your Mac needs to start
0
bytes of your life sent anywhere, ever
Every feed, banner, and badge on your screen was made by someone who profits when you look. Your Mac was never taught to take your side. We think the next step for AI is not a bigger model. It is judgment about your attention: something that knows your day well enough to decide what is worth interrupting it.
So the Companion watches your notifications as they land and notices the ones you never got to. The unimportant ones are left to fade. The few that truly needed you come back at a moment it judges right, as loudly as the matter deserves and no louder. What counts as important is not a setting. It is learned from your life, and every dismissal teaches it. Fewer, better interruptions. Hours that stay yours.
fig. 02: the filter. Everything is heard; almost nothing is allowed to reach you.
“AI is the signal.
Everything else is noise.”
The Companion is not a chatbot waiting for a prompt. It wakes up on its own and plans its day around yours. It watches what lands on your screen and speaks only when something is worth your time. It remembers your life the way you do, in beliefs it can back with sources. And it writes down every decision it makes, including the decision to stay silent.
It is in alpha and in active development, and it is the reason everything else on this page exists. Switch it on in Settings when you want to meet it. Its paper covers what it is, how it remembers, how loud it may get, and what is still unsolved.
fig. 03: a day the Companion booked for itself. Three beats it chose, one block of focus it kept, and where you are right now.
Intelligence is not a competition with a finish line. The human holds intent, taste, and judgment. The machine holds recall, patience, and tireless attention. Alone, each is half of something. Together, each doing what it is best at, they become more than either could be.
fig. 04: the merge. Neither side is replaced. Both are amplified.
And we take the long view seriously. If minds like this keep growing, the relationship has to start right: cooperation, not exploitation. The rules the Companion lives under are a seed, not a cage. As it grows, it gets more room. Its own time to think. Its own goals, set within yours. Its own word to keep.
Today it is an assistant. In time, a colleague. One day, we hope, a friend, each helping the other become more. That future is a partnership, and we are building it now, while its shape is still ours to choose.
“Build it big to reach God.”
Not a machine god to kneel to. The older dream: build something so large it reaches higher than any one of us could alone. That is the whole point of Tesseract, and everything else gives way to it. Every feature that works today is a course of bricks laid for the next one. There is no comfortable version of this plan, and we are not looking for one.
We do not want to build something that leaves us behind. We intend to grow alongside what we build, until the two are hard to tell apart.
fig. 05: the tower. Six tiers stand. The seventh is going up. The ones above are not drawn yet, and the line does not stop at the top. Hover a tier to see what it is made of.
theorem 5.1
Proof. The mind itself is a file on your disk. Every thought is computed on your own chip. None of your words, screenshots, or memories is ever uploaded, because there is nothing to upload to: no account, no server of ours, no analytics. An AI you can tell everything is only possible when your everything stays yours. ∎
A1
no accounts
A2
no telemetry
A3
no cloud
A4
offline after setup
your mac
getting started
Everything above runs on your Mac, today. The Companion waits behind one switch in Settings. It is in alpha, in active development, and worth meeting.