I'm Building a Local AI Agent for My Mac (and iPhone). And It's Actually Working

A local AI agent that runs entirely on your Mac and iPhone is now feasible with Apple Silicon and MLX. The project (Familiar) uses on-device models for routine tasks (message triage, calendar management, quick lookups) and falls back to cloud models only for complex reasoning. The architecture is Swift + MLX on macOS/iOS with a shared context layer. Early results show that 70-80% of daily agent tasks can run locally with acceptable quality. The benefits are immediate: zero API costs for routine operations, sub-100ms response times, and complete privacy for personal data.