shyn — your Mac's memory, on tap ☀️

shyn.day · macOS (Apple Silicon) · pre-alpha · Elastic License 2.0

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.

Quickstart

Install with Homebrew (recommended)

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)

pnpm install

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

Register the MCP server with Claude Code:

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:

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

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).

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 bridging MCP to OpenAPI:

  bash

  Copy

  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

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)