I'm Building a Local AI Agent for My Mac. And It's Actually Working.

Something clicked when I gave a small local model a tool. "List files in this folder, rename anything that matches this pattern." It worked. Fully offline. On my M1 Pro with 16GB RAM. No cloud, no API key, no subscription. Just a 9-billion parameter model doing something useful on my machine. That's when I started building Familiar. Familiar is an open source macOS app (iOS companion coming) that runs a local AI agent on your device. Not a chat interface. An actual agent that can take actions. Here's where it is after the first week: Hardware detection on first launch. The app looks at your RAM, chip, and available resources and recommends the best model you can run without slowing your machine down. You don't have to research this yourself. A default small model ships with the app. You're running a local agent in minutes, not after a 20-minute download. File tools out of the box. Create, rename, move, delete. Basic but real. Works without internet, without API credits, without a month