Open-Source

I’ve spent weeks stress-testing Apple’s on-device model — the ~3B parameter one that runs on the Neural Engine of any Apple Silicon Mac. To test it thoroughly, I built Think Local, a macOS app that exercises every capability of the model: chat, image generation, structured output, tool calling, and parameter comparison. My conclusion: As a chatbot, the model is terrible. As a structured output and tool calling engine, it’s surprisingly good. ...

NLTagger is Apple’s API for sentiment analysis. It’s integrated into iOS and macOS, runs on-device, needs no server, and is three lines of code away. It’s the first thing you find when searching for “sentiment analysis Swift”. Here’s what it returns for text any developer would write on a normal day: Message NLTagger Reality “delete the temp file” -0.8 Neutral instruction “ok” -0.8 Neutral confirmation “run make test” -0.6 Neutral instruction “commit and push” -0.4 Neutral instruction “great job, thanks!” +1.0 Positive (correct) “this is fucking broken” -1.0 Negative (correct) The scale goes from -1.0 (very negative) to +1.0 (very positive). According to Apple, “delete the temp file” carries almost the same emotional weight as “this is fucking broken”. And “ok” – the most neutral response in the English language – scores -0.8. ...

Yesterday I wrote a commit message with Claude Code. The diff was a one-line change: a typo in a comment. Claude Opus read the diff, thought for two seconds, and generated fix: correct typo in auth comment. That consumed about 800 input tokens and 30 output tokens, at $15 and $75 per million respectively. Cost: a fraction of a cent. But multiply that by 40 commits per day, 250 days per year, across a company with 200 developers using coding agents, and the fraction of a cent becomes thousands of dollars spent on the intellectual equivalent of applying band-aids. ...

A space lobster on your computer Picture this: an Austrian developer creates a personal AI assistant, names it after a space lobster, and decides to open-source it. Within 24 hours it has 9,000 GitHub stars. Within 48 hours, 17,000. It also has 300+ open issues, several critical security vulnerabilities, and someone created an unofficial cryptocurrency with its name. Welcome to Clawdbot. What exactly is this thing? Clawdbot is an open-source AI assistant that runs locally on your machine. The difference from other assistants: it doesn’t just answer questions, it does things. ...