Hi HN! I'm Sean, and I built ChatShell to solve two frustrations I had with AI desktop clients: most are just chat wrappers with no real agent capabilities, and they're bloated Electron apps (200-300MB+).
ChatShell is different. It's a 22MB AI agent (47MB on macOS universal) built with Tauri 2, not Electron. It ships with 9 built-in tools (Web Search, Web Fetch, Bash, File Access, etc.) that work out of the box—no MCP servers to configure, no plugins to install. Privacy-first with AES-256 encryption and local SQLite storage, no telemetry. Full MCP support (STDIO, HTTP, OAuth 2.1/PKCE) and works with 40+ AI providers including local models.
I've been dogfooding this daily. Recently I installed Vercel's agent-browser skill and it's been amazing—I can now ask it to "open my GitHub PRs and summarize what needs review" or "fill out this repetitive web form for me".
The agent capabilities + Skills extensibility is where it really shines. Current limitations: Still early stage. Would love feedback on what agent tools matter most to you, and whether the small binary size is actually important or just my personal obsession.
Happy to answer questions!
