Does chanio store my AI conversations in the cloud?

No. Your notes, including any AI conversations you save to it, stay as plain files in a folder on your Mac, and the everyday answers come from a small AI running there. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you choose it: with your own Claude key, a question you send, or the questions you kept for tonight in one small batch, under a daily spending limit you set. The meter shows what went.

Do I need to install anything or get an API key to try chanio?

No. Try it at chanio.com/try with no signup: a small AI downloads into the page. On a Mac, one line in Terminal sets it up in a few minutes, most of it the one-time 2 GB download of the small AI. A Claude key is only needed if you want chanio to send hard questions to a bigger AI for you; without one, it gets them ready to paste into the AI you already use.

What happens to my existing ChatGPT or Claude conversation history?

The export-rescue tool at chanio.com/export-rescue parses your export ZIP entirely in the browser -- no upload, no account, no API key -- into a knowledge-graph preview, and one click downloads the whole thing as an Obsidian vault of wikilinked markdown.

Mac · a few minutes, plus one download

One line, and it’s on your Mac.

It adds a small AI that runs on your Mac, a folder for your notes, and a quiet pass over them each night. Then type chanio door and it opens in your browser. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you add your own key and choose to send a question.

Open Terminal and paste this

paste into Terminal

curl -fsSL https://chanio.com/install.sh | sh

To open Terminal, press ⌘ Space, type Terminal and press Return.

It tells you before each download (the tools it needs, and the small AI itself, about 2 GB) and never asks for your password. Needs macOS 14 or newer. Want to read every line first? Here is the whole installer.

What you can type

chanio door

opens chanio in your browser, as a page only your own Mac can reach. Ask questions, save notes, and see the sentence each answer came from.

chanio ask "…"

asks the same way, right in Terminal.

chanio capture

saves whatever you copied (a conversation with another AI, an article, a plan) to your notes.

chanio brief

reads this morning's summary: what changed, what is still open, and answers to the questions it kept for tonight.

chanio status

checks that everything is in place.

chanio uninstall

stops the nightly run. Your files stay.

More things you can type

chanio hold "…"

keeps a question for tonight without trying it first.

chanio route "…"

shows whether a question would be answered here or is worth sending, without running anything.

chanio nightly

runs tonight's pass now, instead of waiting for 5 a.m.

chanio kept

copies the questions you kept, ready to paste into the AI you already use.

chanio answer

adds that AI's answer to this morning's summary. In the door, both are buttons under the morning summary.

chanio meter

what was answered where, and anything it cost.

chanio budget

your daily spending limit for questions you send (there is a default; change it any time).

chanio memory

a short summary of what matters to you, to paste into any AI so it starts out knowing you.

chanio reaim

what you said you're aiming at, next to what you actually spent time on.

chanio share

a card on one topic, with private details taken out, to hand to a person or another AI.

chanio mcp

lets coding tools like Claude Code or Cursor read your notes.

chanio update

gets the newest version.

When it doesn’t know

The small AI answers from your notes, and shows the sentence it used. When your notes don’t cover a question, it says so instead of guessing, and you choose: keep the question for tonight, or send it now to a bigger AI.

Sending works only if you add your own Claude key, in the door’s settings. What gets sent is a short write-up with just the notes it needs, and only up to a daily spending limit you set. Without a key nothing is ever sent: the questions kept for tonight are packed up so you can paste them into the AI you already use. A question that looks private (a password, a key, a health detail) is never sent.

Your things stay yours

Everything chanio keeps is ordinary text files in a folder called chanio in your home folder: your notes, what you saved, the morning summaries, and a log of what was answered where. Any text editor opens them. Delete the folder and chanio is gone.

Rather build a simpler version yourself?

Paste this prompt into the AI you already use (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, any of them). It walks you through a smaller version of the same idea, and you see every line it writes.

paste into your AI

Set up "chanio-lite," my own private AI brain, on my Mac. Do it step by step and explain as you go:

1. Check if Ollama is installed (run: ollama --version). If not, tell me to download it from ollama.com/download.
2. Start Ollama and pull a small model that runs fine on a laptop: ollama pull llama3.2:3b
   (If my Mac has 16GB+ RAM and I want a stronger brain, also: ollama pull qwen3:14b)
3. Make a folder ~/chanio/notes/ — I'll drop .md or .txt notes in there (my plans, ideas, anything I want it to know). It's plain markdown, so I can open the folder in Obsidian too.
4. Create ~/chanio/ask.mjs: it takes my question from the command line, keyword-searches my notes for the relevant lines, and sends those lines + my question to the local model at http://localhost:11434/api/chat (model llama3.2:3b, stream:false, think:false). It prints a 2-4 sentence answer. Then it makes a SECOND quick local call asking the model to judge — as JSON {"escalate": true|false} — whether the question is meaningful enough for a frontier AI (a hard decision or deep reasoning; most are NOT). If true, it appends the question as a line to ~/chanio/todays-questions.md.
5. Create ~/chanio/tonight.mjs: it prints everything in todays-questions.md as one clean prompt for me to paste into the AI I already use (with a note asking each AI to answer thoughtfully), then archives it to ~/chanio/archive/<date>.md and clears the file.
6. Create ~/chanio/growth.mjs: it reads ~/chanio/feedback.md (where I paste the AIs' answers back), sends it to the local model asking for exactly three sections — CONSENSUS, DISAGREEMENT (and which view is more convincing), and 3 TAKEAWAYS — then saves the result to ~/chanio/growth/<date>.md and clears feedback.md.
7. Use only Node's built-in modules (no npm install). When done, show me the three commands:
   node ~/chanio/ask.mjs "my question"
   node ~/chanio/tonight.mjs
   node ~/chanio/growth.mjs

Keep everything local and simple. Nothing should call any cloud API.

A bigger version of the same idea runs every night on the founder’s Mac; the home page shows last night’s counts. This one is small enough to read in an afternoon.

Mac only for now. On any other computer, try it in your browser.

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