Press ⌥C on anything to run smart actions: AI prompts, shell scripts, GitHub issues, Linear tickets, or send results anywhere... All one keystroke away. Bring your own brain: bundled Ministral 3B for zero-setup local AI, any HuggingFace MLX model for Apple Silicon speed, or connect Ollama, LM Studio, Apple Intelligence, or OpenRouter. Free, MIT licensed. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.
Cai is my attempt to escape the "⌘Tab fatigue" for everyday tasks (eg. copy something → ⌘Tab to Claude → paste, wait, follow-up → ⌘Tab back, paste, copy → ⌘Tab to browser…) Probably 30+ times a day?
I originally tried shipping it as a Raycast extension, but it's been sitting in their review queue ever since, so I decided to build Cai natively from scratch with simplicity, privacy and ownership in mind.
As models keep improving and commoditising, I strongly believe local and privacy-first is the way forward (my Gmail from 2005 is probably in some model's weights now, writing bad poetry to strangers.). Cai aims to become the assistant you own, that runs on your Mac and you never have to think twice about what data you're feeding it.
Cai is free, MIT licensed, and a few amazing people are already helping with ideas and code (massive thanks for your support! 🙏). Everything in the demo runs 100% on your Mac.
⌥C as the trigger is the kind of choice that either becomes muscle memory
in a day or never gets used. "Local" is the part that's going to drive
most of the adoption here — Raycast has the shortcut space but the cloud
dependency. Curious what the model footprint looks like at rest.
Wow this is really really cool - is this open source - this is what software should be minimal and simple and does what it has to do.
This looks sharp. What do you think will surprise people most once they actually use it?
@soyasis Congratulations. And happy product launch.
About Cai on Product Hunt
“Press ⌥C on anything to run smart actions, locally”
Cai launched on Product Hunt on April 22nd, 2026 and earned 161 upvotes and 23 comments, placing #7 on the daily leaderboard. Press ⌥C on anything to run smart actions: AI prompts, shell scripts, GitHub issues, Linear tickets, or send results anywhere... All one keystroke away. Bring your own brain: bundled Ministral 3B for zero-setup local AI, any HuggingFace MLX model for Apple Silicon speed, or connect Ollama, LM Studio, Apple Intelligence, or OpenRouter. Free, MIT licensed. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.
Cai was featured in Productivity (650.6k followers), Developer Tools (511.7k followers) and Artificial Intelligence (467.2k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 285.8k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Cai?
Cai was hunted by Asís. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Cai stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Asís
Greetings again, PH 👋
Cai is my attempt to escape the "⌘Tab fatigue" for everyday tasks (eg. copy something → ⌘Tab to Claude → paste, wait, follow-up → ⌘Tab back, paste, copy → ⌘Tab to browser…) Probably 30+ times a day?
I originally tried shipping it as a Raycast extension, but it's been sitting in their review queue ever since, so I decided to build Cai natively from scratch with simplicity, privacy and ownership in mind.
As models keep improving and commoditising, I strongly believe local and privacy-first is the way forward (my Gmail from 2005 is probably in some model's weights now, writing bad poetry to strangers.). Cai aims to become the assistant you own, that runs on your Mac and you never have to think twice about what data you're feeding it.
Cai is free, MIT licensed, and a few amazing people are already helping with ideas and code (massive thanks for your support! 🙏). Everything in the demo runs 100% on your Mac.
Roast it in the thread, I'll be around all day.
Much love,
Asís