Architecture

Tauri v2 menu bar app (Rust core + React frontend) with biometric unlock via macOS Keychain, encrypted local storage via SQLCipher, and full-text search. LLM auto-summarisation, wiki compilation, and graph visualisation of how ideas link together.

Case study

McWiki

Private knowledge OS — your ideas, always at hand.

McWiki is a local-first, biometrically secured macOS menu bar app inspired by Andrej Karpathy's "compounding wiki" pattern. It watches the notes and ideas you're already capturing, auto-summarises them with an LLM, and compounds them into a wiki you actually keep coming back to.

Everything stays on your machine. The database is encrypted with SQLCipher, unlocked via macOS biometric authentication through the Keychain, and never leaves the device unless you tell it to.

Highlights

• Menu bar app — always one click away
• Biometric unlock via Touch ID / Face ID through macOS Keychain
• Encrypted local storage with SQLCipher (zero-knowledge)
• LLM auto-summarisation of incoming notes
• Full-text search across the entire knowledge base
• Graph view showing how your ideas link together
• ArXiv explainer built in for paper notes

Stack

Tauri v2 (Rust core + React TypeScript frontend) for native performance and a tiny binary footprint. Sub-second cold start. Cross-platform-ready (macOS today; Linux/Windows on the same codebase when needed).

Tech stack