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Chunks: An On-Device macOS Assistant That Sees Your Screen and Acts Without Moving Your Mouse

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Rishideep Mandavilli built Chunks, a native macOS menu-bar and notch companion that answers questions about what is on screen and can act in apps on the user's behalf. Unlike typical computer-use agents, it avoids hijacking the physical cursor by driving controls through the macOS Accessibility API, and it shows a pointer trail to indicate its actions. It supports a fast optional cloud path via Gemini Flash as well as a fully offline mode running quantized Gemma 4 models through Ollama on Apple Silicon, where a full vision turn takes about 2.3 seconds. The app includes privacy safeguards such as Keychain key storage, local-only memory with secret scrubbing, and consent gates before state-changing actions. The project was built for the Gemma track of an MLH x DEV writing challenge and is available on GitHub.

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