Months of nights and weekends. One scrapped codebase. Today, MyHandler ([myhandler.ai](https://myhandler.ai/)) is live — real product, real download, not a waitlist.

**The thing I wasted way too much time on:** Months into building a cloud SaaS AI assistant, something uncomfortable hit me: I wouldn't trust it with my own data.

The whole pitch was "let me watch your emails, meetings, calendar, documents, and screen so I can help you remember everything." But if another company asked me to upload my entire digital life into their cloud, I'd say absolutely not. I was building the exact thing I'd personally never use.

So I deleted a stupid amount of code and rebuilt it as a local-first desktop app. Best decision I made on this whole project. The thing actually has a soul now.

**What it does:** runs quietly on your desktop and pays attention to everything — your screen text (via Windows accessibility APIs, never screenshots), your meetings (local Whisper), your emails, calendar, documents — so you can find anything you've seen, get briefed before every call, and stop forgetting promises you made on Tuesday.

**Where your data actually lives** (since this is the whole point):

* **Your vault** — meetings, screen text, documents — sits in an AES-256-GCM encrypted SQLite database on your disk. 
* **Cloud channels** (Gmail, IMAP, Slack, GitLab, etc...) route through a thin transit relay so messages can sync while your machine is asleep. On the relay, messages sit **AES-256-GCM column-encrypted at rest** (same scheme as your on-device vault), and they **hard-delete within minutes** of syncing to your desktop. Nothing persists.

**Where the AI actually runs** (since this is the other half of the point)**:**

* **Cloud mode (the speed default):** uses Groq under zero-data-retention. Only the minimal context needed for your current question is sent — never your vault, never stored, never used for training. Classification and storage always happen on your device.
* **Local mode:** flip one switch and the LLM runs fully on-device (Qwen3.5 4B via llama.cpp). Nothing leaves, period.

**Quick rundown:**

1. **Phone it, text it, chat with it.**  —Since MyHandler knows your digital life, you can ask it anything.  From anywhere.  If it saw it, it should remember it.  "Who told me that we are going to miss our Q3 projections?" (Phone feature available on Business/Executive tiers)
2. **Pre-meeting briefings** — A few minutes before any call: *"you have a call with X, here's what you last talked about, here's the doc you need, etc..."* 
3. **Cross-source search** — *"what was Sarah's flight info?"* finds it whether she said it in email, mentioned it in a meeting, or you saw it in a doc on screen last week.
4. **Meeting transcription** — local Whisper.cpp, no audio leaves your machine. Auto-generates notes + action items.
5. **Voice dictation** — tap a hotkey, talk, and tap again, and it types straight into whatever app is focused. HOLD the hotkey and ask it to do something.  Lots of apps do this, but MyHandler has ALL your context available when working on your request.  For example, while replying to an email say *"draft a reply to this email."* A few seconds later MyHandler has checked your screen, read the email, checked your calendar, remembered who the person is, and the draft is inserted right where your cursor is for you to read, tweak, and send. You're always in control.
6. **Sidekick panel** — Hotkey from any app to pull up a Sidekick window that looks at your current context and offers help. Reading a dense technical doc? One click to summarize it. Ask it anything about your own digital life: *"what did I promise the design team last week?"*
7. **Watches** — "Notify me whenever I receive an email or message from my boss"
8. **Reminders** — "Remind me every 2 hours to stand up and walk" 
9. **Scheduled tasks** — have your Handler send you a daily briefing every morning at 7am. Or a midday recap. The uses are limitless.

**Coming this week:**

Agentic document creation. Tell your Handler *"make me a docx summarizing my last quarterly meeting and put it on my google drive"* — and a few seconds later there's a docx in your g-drive that you can access from anywhere, with the actual content pulled from the meeting transcript, decisions, and action items. Want a PDF? *"Create a PDF of my notes from yesterday's calls and store it on dropbox."* Done. 

**The stack (since you probably want to know):**

* Tauri 2 + Rust backend, React 19 + TypeScript frontend
* llama.cpp sidecar running a Qwen 3.5 variant picked to match your hardware (2B / 4B / 9B), default 4B
* whisper.cpp sidecar for transcription
* sqlite-vec + FTS5 hybrid search over your local vault
* snowflake-arctic-embed-s (384-dim) for embeddings via ONNX Runtime
* AES-256-GCM encrypted SQLite, key in Windows Credential Manager

Default mode uses Groq cloud for the LLM (faster). A single click flips it to fully local Qwen 3.5. Even on the cloud setting, no LLM ever has access to your files and data — classification and storage happen on your device. Only the bits needed to answer your current question ever touch the cloud. Your vault stays on your machine, encrypted, period.

**The personal honest bit:** I'm a crazy multi-tasker with a memory span equal to that of a gnat.  Constantly trying to remember where something is ... which file ... which email ... which app.  Now I just ask my handler and I hit the ground running.  I also love how my handler nudges me when something matters. It's the kind of tool I genuinely can't go back from.

**What's next:** macOS port (my Mac friends have almost disowned me), then Linux. A bigger embedding model upgrade path. Smarter pre-meeting briefings that pull from more of the vault.

**Where it's at:**

* Windows only for now
* Free tier + paid tiers starting at $15/mo
* I personally use it every day

**Ask:** brutal feedback on the landing page (myhandler.ai). One specific thing I keep rewriting: does the *"cloud AI default-on, one click to fully local"* framing make sense, or does the privacy story get muddled? Can't tell if it lands.

Happy to nerd out about the stack, the pivot, anything.

Months in, I deleted my whole cloud SaaS and rebuilt it as a local-first desktop AI. Like Rewind, but your data never leaves your machine.