shyn

Local-first ambient memory for your Mac — pages, meetings, notes, encrypted on-device.

Open source Open in the app JSON README (API)

About

Local-first ambient memory for your Mac — pages, meetings, notes, encrypted on-device.

Details

Kind: MCP servers
Topic: AI, RAG & memory
Publisher: day.shyn
Origin: official
Category: ferramentas
Transport: local
Version: 0.5.5-alpha
Last push: 2026-09-01T12:44:09Z
Repository state: ativo
Language: TypeScript
License: NOASSERTION
Added: 2026-08-29 03:01:28
Updated: 2026-09-08 04:02:43
Origin id: day.shyn/shyn

README

# shyn — your Mac's memory, on tap ☀️

**[shyn.day](https://shyn.day)** · macOS (Apple Silicon) · pre-alpha · [Elastic License 2.0](LICENSE)

**Shyn is the always-on memory companion for your Mac.** It quietly
remembers what you see, hear, and read — your screen, your meetings, your
browsing, your notes — and gives your AI assistant total recall over *your*
life. Ask Claude "what did we decide in yesterday's standup?" or "where did
I read about that retention bug?" and get an answer grounded in your own
history, not the internet's.

**Your memory stays local. Private by design.** Everything shyn captures
lives in an encrypted database on your Mac. Nothing it captures is uploaded,
synced, or phoned home — the only bytes that ever leave your machine are the
few snippets relevant to a question *you* chose to ask, sent to the AI *you*
chose to ask it.

**During beta, shyn also sends anonymous usage data.** shyn runs across
different macOS versions, hardware, and permission states, and those
combinations produce bugs we cannot reproduce or test for. Most people who
hit one never write in; they just quit the app. So shyn reports which
features get used, what crashes, its version, and timing numbers, tied to a
random ID that is not you.

It never includes anything shyn captured. No screen text, no transcripts, no
searches, no identity. **You choose on first run**, and one click in Settings
changes it any time. Turn it off and shyn is exactly what it promises above:
nothing but your own questions leaving your machine.

> **Status: pre-alpha.** Shyn is young, moving fast, and macOS-only
> (Apple Silicon). Expect rough edges and breaking changes. Install is a
> two-command Homebrew cask (`brew install` + `shyn setup`) — the apps are
> self-signed and re-signed locally by `shyn setup`, not Apple-notarized;
> notarized one-click installs are on the roadmap.

## Why shyn

- 🧠 **Total recall, instantly.** Hybrid search — keyword (FTS5/BM25) +
semantic (on-device embeddings) — across everything you've captured, in
milliseconds, over a local socket.
- 👁️ **Ambient screen memory.** A featherweight agent captures the text on
your screen as you work — what you read, wrote, and clicked becomes
searchable history.
- 🎙️ **Meetings, remembered.** Shyn detects your calls, records both sides
locally, transcribes on-device with Whisper, and files a speaker-labeled
transcript into your memory. Audio never crosses a socket and is purged
the moment the transcript lands — text in, bytes gone. Grant Calendar
access and transcripts get titled from the event they belong to
("Sprint standup", attendees included) — read from your Mac's own
calendar store, no Google API, nothing leaves the machine.
- 🌐 **Your digital trail, connected.** Chrome and Safari history and Apple
Notes flow in automatically; files and PDFs on demand.
- ☀️ **Glanceable peace of mind.** A frosted-glass menu bar companion shows
everything is running — one sun in your menu bar, four live states, a
pulsing red dot whenever a meeting is being recorded. Never silent,
never sneaky.
- 🔒 **Consent-first capture.** Recording announces itself and is
cancellable in its grace window. Pause everything with one click or
`shyn pause 30m`. Exclude apps. Delete anything — `forget` is
byte-honest: vacuumed, gone, not soft-deleted.
- ⚡ **Instant-on by design.** Keyword search works from second zero; the
embedding model downloads in the background and results silently upgrade
to hybrid. The model is never on the critical path.

## How it works

A background daemon owns an encrypted SQLite index (key in your macOS
Keychain) and serves JSON-RPC over a unix socket. Capture agents — screen,
meetings — and source readers — Chrome, Safari, Apple Notes — feed it.
Your AI talks to it through five MCP tools. That's the whole trick: one
private index, many memories, any MCP-speaking assistant.

| Tool | What your AI gets |
|---|---|
| `search_memory(query, …)` | Hybrid search with provenance — the workhorse |
| `recent_activity(hours?, …)` | Orientation timeline; great first call on vague questions |
| `remember(content, tags?)` | Explicit "write this down" memory |
| `forget(doc_id \| source \| time-range, confirm)` | Honest deletion; refuses without `confirm: true` |
| `memory_status()` | Health, index counts, model download %, connected sources |

## Quickstart

### Install with Homebrew (recommended)

```bash
brew install --cask shyn-labs/tap/shyn
shyn setup
```

Two commands: the cask verifies the download against its pinned checksum,
and `shyn setup` starts everything and walks you through permissions via
the ☀️ menu bar window. No Node, no Xcode, no cloning. Read the cask's
caveats — they're the honest fine print (local signing, quarantine, EDR).
Update later with `brew upgrade shyn && shyn setup`.

### Or build from source (for contributors)

```bash
pnpm install

# start the daemon (first run downloads the embedding model in the
# background; search works before that finishes)
pnpm --filter @shyn/daemon start
```

```bash
claude mcp add shyn -- pnpm --dir <path-to-shyn-repo> --filter @shyn/mcp-client exec tsx src/main.ts
```

Substitute `<path-to-shyn-repo>` with the absolute path where you cloned
this repo (e.g. the output of `pwd` run from inside it).

Feed it something and ask Claude about it:

```bash
pnpm shyn ingest /absolute/path/to/some/folder
```

Use an absolute path: it's stored as the document's `uri`. Ingest accepts a
single file (`.md`, `.txt`, `.pdf`) or a directory to walk. Pull in browser
history and Apple Notes any time with `pnpm shyn sync`.

### Go full companion (daemon + agents + menu bar) — one command

```bash
pnpm setup
```

That's it: installs dependencies, creates a stable local signing identity,
builds the daemon bundle + capture agents + status app, and starts
everything under launchd. Idempotent — re-run it after every `git pull`.

Under the hood it stages and starts everything — daemon, screen agent,
meeting agent, and the menu bar status app — surviving reboots, logging to
`~/Library/Logs/shyn/`. Grant the permissions macOS asks for (Microphone +
System Audio for meetings; Screen Recording + Accessibility for screen
capture; Full Disk Access only if you want Safari/Notes — everything else
works without it, no dark patterns, no nagging).

```bash
pnpm shyn uninstall # stop + remove, keep data
pnpm shyn uninstall --purge # scorched earth: data, logs, keys
```

### Claude Desktop

`pnpm build:mcpb` produces `dist/shyn.mcpb` — drag it onto Claude Desktop's
Settings → Extensions page. (Registers the MCP client; the daemon must be
running via `install` above.)

### Other clients, including fully local models

Shyn is a standard stdio MCP server — any MCP client works, and your memory
never has to touch a paid API at all. Tested so far:

- **Claude Code / Claude Desktop** — daily drivers, best-in-class at knowing
*when* to reach into memory unprompted.
- **Qwen3 14B running locally** (MLX on Apple Silicon) via Open WebUI, with
[mcpo](https://github.com/open-webui/mcpo) bridging MCP to OpenAPI:

```bash
uvx mcpo --port 8600 -- "$HOME/Library/Application Support/shyn/bin/shyn-mcp"
# then add http://localhost:8600 as a tool server in Open WebUI
```

Honest notes from testing: retrieval quality is identical everywhere — the
ranking runs inside the daemon, not the model. What varies is the driver.
Smaller local models answer well when you're explicit ("search my memory
for…") but are less reliable at deciding to search on their own, and
thinking-mode models may need their reasoning reined in (`/no_think` for
Qwen3). Budget ~10GB of unified memory for a 14B model alongside the daemon.

## Everyday controls

```bash
pnpm shyn status # daemon + agents + index health
pnpm shyn search "that one thing" # search from the terminal
pnpm shyn pause 30m # pause all capture (2h, until-tomorrow too); resume to undo
pnpm shyn exclude com.1password.1password # never capture an app
pnpm shyn meeting status # live meeting controls (stop | cancel too)
```

…or skip the terminal entirely and click the ☀️ in your menu bar.

## The fine print (we sweat it so you don't)

- **Encryption at rest** protects against stolen disks and leaked backups —
not against malware running as your own user. We say this out loud.
- **Meetings**: channel-based speaker labels (`Me:` / `Others:`), 10-second
cancellable grace before any recording, 180-minute hard cap, temp audio
byte-purged on ingest. Transcription defaults to Whisper `small`; at that
size Hindi/Hinglish and other non-English speech often lands as an English
gist (documented, not hidden). For markedly better multilingual
transcripts, click **Multilingual** under "Meeting language" in the menu
bar popover (a ~3GB one-time download that starts immediately; the
popover says plainly which model your next meeting will use). Same
switch by hand: `"meeting": { "whisperModel": "large-v3" }` in
`~/Library/Application Support/shyn/capture.json`; `medium` is the
middle ground. Config hot-reloads, no restart.
- **Meeting titles are optional and layered**: the calendar event first
(needs Calendar access), the call window's title second (needs
Accessibility), plain "app · date" otherwise. Decline everything and
meetings still transcribe fine.
- **The menu bar app checks GitHub once a day for a newer release** — a
plain unauthenticated request for the latest version number; nothing
about you or your machine rides along. Turn it off with
`"updateCheck": false` in capture.json.
- **Anonymous usage data during beta.** The daemon is the only component
that sends it, and only after you have answered the first-run prompt.
What goes: which features were used, crashes, version and OS, timing
numbers, under a random ID unconnected to you. What never goes: anything
shyn captured, including search text, document titles and file paths
(error messages are scrubbed of credentials and home-directory paths
before sending). Event names come from a fixed list in
[`analytics.ts`](packages/daemon/src/analytics.ts) — read it; that list
is the whole surface. Turning it off in Settings stops sending
immediately and discards anything queued. The capture agents themselves
make no network requests, ever.
- **Sources that need permissions report themselves unavailable with a
plain-language reason** instead of silently capturing nothing.
- The eval harness (`pnpm eval:keyword`, `eval:hybrid`) runs a synthetic
corpus against pre-committed pass/fail bars for CI. It is not a benchmark
and its numbers are not an accuracy claim.
- Accepted gaps and sharp edges live in [`docs/known-issues.md`](docs/known-issues.md) —
honesty is a feature.

## What shyn never does

- **Ships your captured memory anywhere.** Screen text, transcripts,
documents and search queries never leave your Mac, under any setting.
Outbound traffic is limited to three things: the snippets relevant to a
question you asked, the menu bar app's version check against GitHub, and
the anonymous beta usage data described below.
- **Stores what you searched for.** Usage stats are counts in your local
database (searches per day as a number — never the query). The same is
true of what is reported during beta: that a search happened, never what
it was.
- **Sends anything before you have seen the choice.** During beta shyn
reports anonymous usage and crash data, and it asks on first run before a
single event is queued. Decline and no identifier is even generated;
change it any time in Settings. See "Anonymous usage data during beta"
above for what is and is not included.
- **Ships your content anywhere.** When something breaks, run `shyn diagnose`:
it prints a copy-pasteable block of versions, service states, and
error-log lines — zero document content — and *you* choose where to
paste it.

## License

[Elastic License 2.0](LICENSE) (source-available).

In plain words: use it, read it, modify it, share it — personally or at
work, for free. What you may not do is sell shyn or offer it to others as
a commercial or managed service; that right stays with the project. The
full text is one page and worth reading.

shyn

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