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shyn — your Mac's memory, on tap ☀️

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.

100% local. Zero cloud. Private by design. Everything shyn captures lives in an encrypted database on your Mac. Nothing 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.

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.
• 🌐 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.

Tool	What your AI gets
search_memory(query, …)	Hybrid search with provenance — the workhorse
recent_activity(hours?, …)	Orientation timeline; great first call on vague questions
remember(content, tags?)	Explicit "write this down" memory
forget(doc_id | source | time-range, confirm)	Honest deletion; refuses without confirm: true
memory_status()	Health, index counts, model download %, connected sources

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.)

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)

• Encryption at rest protects against stolen disks and leaked backups — not against malware running as your own user. We say this out loud.
• Meetings: channel-based speaker labels (Me: / Others:), 10-second cancellable grace before any recording, 180-minute hard cap, temp audio byte-purged on ingest. Hindi/Hinglish speech currently lands as an English gist (Whisper behavior — documented, not hidden).
• Sources that need permissions report themselves unavailable with a plain-language reason instead of silently capturing nothing.
• The eval harness (pnpm eval:keyword, eval:hybrid) runs a synthetic corpus against pre-committed pass/fail bars for CI. It is not a benchmark and its numbers are not an accuracy claim.
• Accepted gaps and sharp edges live in docs/known-issues.md — honesty is a feature.

What shyn never does

• Phones home. No telemetry, no analytics endpoint, no crash reporter. There is no server to send anything to.
• Stores what you searched for. Usage stats are counts in your local database (searches per day as a number — never the query).
• Ships your content anywhere. When something breaks, run shyn diagnose: it prints a copy-pasteable block of versions, service states, and error-log lines — zero document content — and you choose where to paste it.

License

Elastic License 2.0 (source-available).

In plain words: use it, read it, modify it, share it — personally or at work, for free. What you may not do is sell shyn or offer it to others as a commercial or managed service; that right stays with the project. The full text is one page and worth reading.