A real model. A real memory. Your Mac.
One line in Terminal. It installs the chanio starter, pulls a small model that runs on your own chip, makes a notes folder that is plain Markdown, and schedules the nightly run. Nothing in it calls a cloud API unless you add a key — and then the meter shows you exactly what that cost.
One line
macOS only, no administrator password. If Node is missing it downloads the official build into ~/chanio/node; if Ollama is missing it downloads the Ollama app into ~/Applications; it says so before each download. Read every line of the installer before you run it: chanio.com/install.sh. The starter itself is one small file of plain Node, no dependencies, in ~/chanio/bin.
What you end up with
answers from your notes, on this Mac, for $0 — and names the note it used. When it can't answer well, it says so and holds the question for tonight.
saves whatever is on your clipboard — a chat, an article, a decision — into ~/chanio/captures as a dated Markdown file.
runs by itself at 05:00: compiles the day's notes into a brief (local, $0), then sends the held questions out in one batch if you added a key — or packs them into a file to paste into the AI you already use.
this morning's brief: what mattered, open threads, three questions worth holding, and the answers that came back overnight.
what ran where and what it cost — on-device tokens at $0.00, rented batches with the dollars next to them. One line per event in meter.jsonl.
That is the whole loop: answers free on your device, the hard ones held for tonight, and one rented batch overnight — the only thing that ever costs money, pennies to about fifty cents, and only if you put ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=… in ~/chanio/.env. Without a key nothing leaves the machine; the held questions are packed for you to paste, and chanio answer files the reply.
~/chanio/notes is where you drop anything you want it to know. captures, briefs, held.md and meter.jsonl sit beside it. All plain text. Open the folder in Obsidian and it is a vault. Delete the folder and chanio is gone; keep it and any future model can read it. chanio uninstall removes only the nightly job.
Prefer to build it by hand?
Same loop, every line visible. Open the AI you already use (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — any of them) and paste this one prompt. It installs Ollama, pulls the model, and writes three small scripts you can read in ten minutes.
What the starter is not. It is not the founder's full system, which captures every AI session he has, compiles them nightly, and runs his working life on a 35B local model. The starter is the free tier: the same three-tier loop, small enough to read in an afternoon, with the same meter. Pro runs the full loop for you overnight — private beta.
Windows & Android: the paste-at-night ritual works everywhere today; the full local setup lands 2027. iPhone & iPad: next — today the in-browser model at /try runs on iPhone 15 Pro or newer on iOS 26.