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.
hello
File-backed memory (MEMORY.md + daily logs) is the right architecture. Stateless chat is a demo; continuity is the product.
Tradeoff I'm exploring: local MCP is powerful, but a lot of people never set it up. A hosted "you just text" layer with the same memory idea (prefs/people/history) gets non-technical users 80% of the way without a Mac that runs 24/7.
Curious whether you've tried exposing any of that memory over iMessage/SMS for when you're away from the desk.