I work on a Mac all day, and one thing kept ruining the whole "AI agents can do the work" idea for me: the moment an agent needed to open a browser or click around a native app, it became my problem again. A terminal-based coding agent is useful. But the jobs I actually wanted to hand off weren't always in the terminal. They involved a browser I'd already logged into, a spreadsheet, a settings window, a file in Finder, or checking whether an app really did what the agent said it did. So I've been building Mac MCP, a local MCP server with a native macOS menu bar app. It's open source (MIT): https://github.com/bulutarkan/mac-mcp The initial idea was simple: let ChatGPT, Claude, Codex and other MCP clients use the Mac I'm already working on, rather than telling me which buttons to press. Then I ran into the less glamorous stuff. Two agents, one browser. Giving both agents access to Safari isn't enough. One can switch tabs while the other is filling a form, or steal focus right as I start typing. Mac MCP has background browser work and tab ownership so an agent can operate in a tab without taking over my active one. Right now I actually have different agents working on different parts of this project's marketing, and keeping their browser work apart matters more to me than adding another fancy AI model. "Done" isn't evidence. I've seen UI actions that appeared to succeed but the site hadn't saved anything. Server restart commands can also return before the new process is genuinely healthy. I started treating verification and honest failure states as first-class product features. The app shows live tool activity, session details and approvals; the newer scheduled tasks include result and step reports. Safety got real very quickly. A local agent has whatever powers you give it. Calling it "local" doesn't make it safe. There are permission profiles, approval points for higher-risk actions and an undo path for some file operations. But this is not an isolated sandbox. It runs under your Mac user's permissions, and content shared with a cloud AI client still goes to that provider. More recently I've been working on the parts that make repeated work worth delegating at all: scheduled AI/script tasks, reusable recipes, and local document search that can cite file/page sources. Scanned PDFs can be read with on-device OCR. It's still very much a project I use and improve in the open. A few practical details, because I hate when a project post hides the catch: it's for macOS, the Apple Silicon package needs macOS 14+, there's an installer path for macOS 13+, and the current package isn't notarized. It is free, not a subscription product. Your AI model/provider may still have its own cost. The question I'm trying to answer now isn't "how many tools can I expose to an AI?" It's "how do you make the agent useful while the owner keeps using the machine?" If you've tried getting two or more agents to work on the same desktop, what broke first for you: the browser, the permissions, or knowing whether an action actually finished?   submitted by   /u/bulutarkan [link]   [comments]