Stratten Waldt

Hi. I'd like to introduce you to Basil. It's a project I've been working on and working with for over a year. It's an AI assistant for your Mac. You press a hotkey or say "Hey Basil" and tell it what you need. It sees what you're working on, understands the context, and handles it. I wanted to create something that was a joy to use. Something that made AI feel magical, but also like a seamless extension of my own capabilties. Something that fit into my workflow and was always there when I needed it, without being intrusive. When I started building this, it was called "Jarvish", because I was genuinely trying to build Jarvis. And because I've always wanted a cease and desist from Disney. That was a year ago. Since then it's grown into something much bigger than what I originally had in mind. It does voice- (or keyboard-) initiated agentic workflows from anywhere, context-aware content generation, live meeting transcription, direct application interaction, file management, shell commands, AppleScript automation. And it can do pretty much everything using local models. It also does regular ol' transcription, if you want to be vanilla. It really seems like AI has lost its shine for a lot of people. Every app tries to cram a button into every surface whether you asked for it or not (seriously, fuck you Copilot. I downgraded to an older version of word just so I don't have your obnoxious icon every time I start a new line). It feels less like a tool and more like a pop-up ad you can't close. I designed Basil to always be one keystroke away, but never shows up uninvited. That distinction was really important to me. And the more you use it, the more it has to work with. It remembers your conversations, tracks what you've been working on, and can learn your writing style so that what it creates sounds like you, not a robot. It started as a local-first project on purpose. I figured if the core capabilities worked without an internet connection, then cloud models would only make it better. Everything runs on your Mac, your data stays on your machine. If you want to use cloud models, you can use Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, or any custom endpoint you want. Bring your own API keys, bring your own models. But nothing leaves your computer unless you decide it should. The current version is free. No email, no credit card, no trial period. Just download it. I've spent a year building this mostly in isolation, and at this point, what I want more than anything is for people to use it. I use it every day. It saves me hours. It's genuinely the most useful thing on my computer. But there has never been a moment where it felt *done*, and I'm realizing that moment is probably never going to come. I've learned more about architecture and engineering building this than I did in the five years before it, and I'm really proud of where it is. If it's as useful to you as it is to me, that's enough for now. So here it is. I made a thing, and I think it's pretty cool. Take a look. See if it's for you. You can see it doing a bunch of things here - basil.ac And you can download it directly here - basil.ac/download P.S. I hope you can feel how much care has gone into this if you use it. Every part of it has been intentionally crafted; down to the window drop shadows, which are custom because the native ones didn't feel quite right. P.P.S. Here it is cleaning up my downloads folder in less than 4 minutes (for me. for you it's only about 45 seconds). If I'm being honest, I probably would have just never gotten around to it otherwise.

There's an old, bad idea that's been trying to resurrect itself on X in the last couple of days. Which makes it time for me to explain exactly why, in the age of LLMs, open-sourcing your code is an even more important security measure than it was before we had robot friends. The underlying principle was discovered in the 1880s by an expert on military cryptography, a man named August Kerckhoffs, writing long before computers were a thing. To start with, you need to focus in on the fact that cryptosystems have two parts. They have methods, and they have keys. You feed a key and a message to a method and get encrypted information that, you hope, only someone else with the same pair of method and key can read. What Kerckhoffs noticed was this: military cryptosystems in normal operation leak information about their methods. Code books and code machines get captured, stolen, betrayed, or lost in simple accidents and found by people you don't want to have them. This was the pre-computer equivalent of an unintended source-code disclosure. Cryptosystems also leak information about their keys - think post-it notes with passwords stuck to a monitor. What Kerckhoffs noticed is that these two different kinds of compromising leakage happen at very different base rates. It is almost impossible to prevent leakage of information about methods, but just barely possible to prevent leakage of information about keys. Why? Keys have fewer bits. This makes them easier to keep secret. Remember: this was something an intelligent man could notice in the 1880s, well before even vacuum tubes. Which is your first clue that the power of this observation hasn't changed just because we're in the middle of a freaking Singularity. Security through obscurity - closed source code - means you're busted if either the source code or the keys get leaked. Open source is a preemptive strike - it's a way to force the property that your security depends *only* on keeping the keys secret. What you're doing by designing under the assumption of open source is preventing source code leakage from being a danger. And that's the kind of leakage with a high base rate. As far back as 1947 Claude Shannon applied this to electronic security - he did critical work on the voice scramblers that were used for secure telephone communications between heads of state during World War II. Shannon said one should always design as though "the enemy knows the system". The US's National Security Agency still uses this as a guiding principle in computer-based cryptosystems. If you're doing software security, always design as though the enemy can see your source code. I'm still a little puzzled that I was apparently the first person to notice that this was a general argument for open source; as soon as I did, my first thought was more or less "Duh? Somebody should have noticed this sooner?" Now let's consider how LLMs change this picture. Or...don't. An LLM is like a cryptanalyst with a superhuman attention span that never sleeps. If your system leaks information that can compromise it, that compromise is going to happen a hell of a lot faster than if your adversary has to rely on Mark 1 meatbrains. But it gets worse. With LLMs, decompilation is now fast and cheap. You have to assume that if an adversary can see your executable binary, they can recover the source code. If you were relying on that to be secret, you are *screwed*. Leakage control - limiting the set of bits that can yield a compromise - is more important than ever. So security by code obscurity is an even more brittle and dangerous strategy than it used to be. Anybody who tries to tell you differently is either deeply stupid or trying to sell you something that you should not by any means buy.

@thoniahilary Well, I also talk about programming on here. So I guess that counts.

What else do you do for fun aside from programming.

@StevBuilds Nah, LinkedIn has been dead since 2016 at least.

AI already killed LinkedIn. Maybe X is next...

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I really don't like the UX/UI of most claude apps. Like the models are great, but their apps are usually the last way I choose to interact with them.

@Yuchenj_UW This might be an unpopular opinion, but I really don't like the UX/UI of most claude apps. Like the models are great, but their apps are usually the last way I choose to interact with their models.

Figma stock 20 minutes after the Claude Design announcement. Wild.

@brankopetric00 That's kindof their whole thing lol

Every deployment is a success until someone checks the logs.

@theo @plugdotdev @davis7 Someone's jimmies are thoroughly rustled this week.

Fuck it, doing call outs now. @plugdotdev, stop pretending to represent me and @davis7. We have a significantly better pipeline than you. We help brands more than you. We get COMICALLY more views than all of your talent combined. To any talent currently trapped on Plug, my DMs are open. I'm happy to help you leave and work with an agency that doesn't lie to brands. You'll likely get paid more too :)

Just learned of yet another agency pretending to represent dev creators they have never talked to 🙃

@sandislonjsak @LayahHeilpern Eventually. But first there will be a small bump that continues to get everyone's hopes up.

@LayahHeilpern We go lower now. Painfully lower.

It’s happening… People who don’t usually talk about crypto are asking me if now is a good time to buy You know what that typically means...

Hey there, working on Basil. It's an AI assistant that's always there when you need it, embedded in your Mac - you can engage it with a hotkey or a wake word ("Hey Basil"). You talk to it naturally, tell it what you need in the moment, and it handles it - emails, files, browser actions, research - without you having to stop what you're doing. It's less of a tool you switch to and more of a presence that sees your screen and executes, so you can stay focused on the problem in front of you. basil.ac

Met some awesome builders over the last week, lets keep that going. Are you into: - Building in public - Vibecoding - Building awesome products Reply below and let's connect!👇

@trashh_dev I feel like if you're not, you're just not interacting with enough other developers. Also, how are we quantifying better? I'm pretty deep in python, swift, and TS, but I know fuckall about zig. Is the zig dev better than me? (even though they *definitely* that)

another day in the life

Hey there, working on Basil. It's an AI assistant that's always there when you need it, embedded in your Mac - you can engage it with a hotkey or a wake word ("Hey Basil"). You talk to it naturally, tell it what you need in the moment, and it handles it - emails, files, browser actions, research - without you having to stop what you're doing. It's less of a tool you switch to and more of a presence that sees your screen and executes, so you can stay focused on the problem in front of you. I guess you could call it "ambient AI". basil.ac In the demo here, it doesn't actually have built-in tooling for this set of operations. It figures out how to do what I'm asking on the fly.

Founders— share what you’re building this weekend Let’s send some traffic

@techsavvytravvy See, I think I agree lol x.com/strattenwaldt/…

hard to believe we're past needing software developers when the apps that all of these Al companies ship are so awful and broken

@xeophon Mythos is actually just a Markov chain running on a TI-84. Here is the evidence 👇🧵

Mythos is a neurosymbolic RNN?! 😳 Here is the evidence 👇🧵

@elgermerlo @chrismessina @ProductHunt Got you.

What if... @chrismessina also support my launch on @ProductHunt ?? Would be the best day ever! Crossing my fingers. producthunt.com/products/build…

@icanvardar This has the energy of an aggressive fortune cookie.

if you’re so smart, why haven’t you learned to stop overthinking things that don’t matter

Hey there, I'm working on Basil. It's an AI assistant that's always there when you need it, embedded in your Mac - you can engage it with a hotkey or a wake word ("Hey Basil"). You talk to it naturally, tell it what you need in the moment, and it handles it - emails, files, browser actions, research - without you having to stop what you're doing. It's less of a tool you switch to and more of a presence that sees your screen and executes, so you can stay focused on the problem in front of you. basil.ac In the demo here, it doesn't actually have built-in tooling for this set of operations. It figures out how to do what I'm asking on the fly.

hey builders, Stop building in silence, Build in public and let's blow up together Drop it here!!👇

Hot take - discovering an OS repo for the idea you're working on is actually one of the best learning opportunities you can get as an engineer. It's incredibly instructive if you're willing to actively learn from it bc it lets you compare the solution you've attempted based on your own experience against something built by someone with a different background, for the same goal. It can be a great way to understand your tendencies, identify weaknesses, and learn from better-architected solutions, in the context of something that you haven't just treated as a coding exercise.

Hot take: this process is actually incredibly instructive if you're willing to actively learn from it. It lets you attempt a solution based on your own approaches, then compare against something built by someone with a different background for the same goal. It can be a great way to understand your tendencies, identify weaknesses, and learn from better-architected solutions, in the context of something that you haven't just treated as a coding exercise.

Whatever you're trying to make with vibecoding: 99% chance it's already open-sourced on GitHub.

@RhysSullivan Still waiting for the sequel: 'Building Microservices for Cats' (spoiler: they're all independently deployed and ignore your API calls) bah dum tss

designing data intensive dogs

@icanvardar And if you leave your tools out in the rain, they'll rust, especially if they don't have a finish.

zig isn’t better than rust, people just like arguing about unfinished tools more than using finished ones