johnbean393/Sidekick

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: prerelease_only

Adoption not part of the score

3314 stars · 148 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Sidekick is a native macOS app for chatting with local LLMs powered by a built-in llama.cpp backend, with RAG over local files, folders, and websites. It runs fully offline with a local-first privacy model, while also supporting OpenAI-compatible remote APIs.

Use cases

• chat with a local llm on my mac without sending data to the cloud
• ask questions about my local files and folders with an ai
• build a private offline chatbot with retrieval over documents
• run gguf models like qwen locally on apple silicon
• get cited answers with references from my pdfs and websites
• organize knowledge into topic-specific ai experts

When to choose

• you want a fully offline, privacy-focused LLM chat app on macOS
• you need RAG over local files, folders, and websites with cited references
• you prefer a native Swift/SwiftUI app with no extra dependencies to install
• you want built-in llama.cpp inference with optional OpenAI-compatible API support

When to avoid

• you need a cross-platform or Linux/Windows solution
• your Mac lacks the memory/compute to run local models at acceptable speed
• you need heavy multi-user or server-side deployment features
• you want a cloud-hosted assistant with managed scaling

Facets

application · maturity active

rag llm-inference chatbot chat-interface search-engine large-language-models chatbots privacy artificial-intelligence local-llm llama-cpp swiftui offline-ai gguf local-first agentic-ai deep-research retrieval-augmented-generation macos desktop

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="johnbean393/Sidekick")