I Built a Persistent AI Assistant That Runs on My Mac

Yeah, this is exactly the tradeoff I’ve ended up at too. Local MCP is brilliant if you’re the sort of person who’ll wire it up, but that’s a pretty tiny audience.

The SMS/iMessage layer is where it starts feeling useful away from the desk — quick notes, reminders, “what did I say about X?”, that sort of thing.

I’ve got iMessage/SMS bridged into the assistant on the Mac, mostly as a control surface rather than exposing raw memory directly. The boring bit is permissions: memory needs scopes and auditability, otherwise it gets creepy fast.