A frontier grade harness for open models.

Cowork is the agent. Give it a goal in the composer and it plans the work, does it inside the folders you have granted, and checks that the file it says it wrote is really on disk before it says done. The finished file appears under Outputs on the right with every revision kept, so an earlier version is one click away, and a write can be undone from its receipt. Progress shows each step as it runs; Context shows what it can touch.

It writes decks, PDFs, spreadsheets, documents and working HTML. It does not work outside a folder you have granted, and it does not say done on a file it cannot find. The walkthrough above is three real runs (a game, an essay, a deck) on kimi-k2.6:cloud.

Main is the chat. It uses the same memory and the same permissions as Cowork, and the model it is talking to is named above the composer. The floating mic is a small round button that stays over whatever you are in: Main, Cowork, the Calendar, the Vault. Tap it and it listens, thinks, and answers out loud in the Kokoro voice, then listens for a follow-up before it folds away; its Chat toggle opens a typed version of the same thing.

The mic can be dragged anywhere on the screen, collapsed back to the button, or hidden. It does not listen until it is tapped.

Aletha keeps a memory layer of its own, separate from whatever model is answering. When something useful comes up, such as a name, a preference, a project or a decision, it saves it with where it came from and why it kept it. The Memory page lists every entry: search them, pin the ones that matter, delete any of them, or open the conversation an entry came from.

Because it lives outside the model, it carries across conversations and across model swaps. Switch from the bundled 4B to a 30B or a model through your Ollama account and you do not repeat yourself. Near-duplicates are merged, a contradiction keeps the newer fact and archives the older one, and memories you never use fade rather than being deleted.

TVs and speakers, by voice or by text, over your own network. Say “play something in the living room”, “volume down” or “quiet everything”, from Main, from Cowork, or from the floating mic. Roku TVs today. The Devices page is Device, Connected Devices and Discover Devices: Scan for TVs, Scan for speakers, Add TV / media, and Make this the main TV.

Title lookups (“put Rick and Morty on”) go through a free Watchmode key you paste into Settings › Devices; it is kept in your Mac's keychain, and nothing else about your devices leaves the Mac. Without the key it still opens apps and controls the TV. One step is on the TV itself: Roku's Network access set to Permissive (some call it Enabled). The app cannot change that from the Mac.

A calendar of your own, with Month, Week and Day views and a Calendar Assistant beside them that you type or speak to: “Add meeting July 5th at 3 PM”, what's on today, move something. Events can also be added, edited and removed by hand. It is stored locally on this device; the page says so at the top.

Scheduled tasks can read it: a Monday brief of the week's meetings, written into a note, is one of the presets.

Goals that run on a cadence while you are away: Every day, Weekdays, Every Monday, First of the month. Each has a name and its own instructions, and a Run now for trying one immediately. Results land in the same Outputs as any other run, on the same log. If the agent needs a decision from you while you are away, the task waits, and the Scheduled page shows it under “While you were away” when you return.

Two limits the app states plainly. Scheduled tasks use the folders you have already given Aletha access to; they cannot be given a folder of their own, and they cannot approve anything while you are away. And if your Mac is asleep or Aletha is closed when a task is due, it will not run at that moment.

A private workspace behind its own passphrase, separate from the rest of the app. The first time you open it you choose and confirm a passphrase and create the vault; after that it asks for the passphrase to unlock. What you keep inside is AES-256 encrypted on disk, as the vault's own top bar says, and the model does not read it: nothing in the vault is sent to a model, local or cloud.

It is a place for the things you would not paste into a chat.

Every run works under one of three approval modes, chosen from the pill above the composer, and the pill always shows what is being enforced right now. Ask every time: nothing runs until you approve it. Ask before changes: reads in folders you've allowed run on their own; anything that changes, runs, installs, or leaves your Mac asks. Skip permissions: nothing asks, including deletes, shell and network.

Three things still stop in every mode: a capability you turned off, a target outside your folders, and a missing credential. Deletes stay recoverable from their receipt. Every action is written to the log with who allowed it, and a step the mode let through is marked “ran without asking” in the transcript.

Anything you run in Ollama. A local model is picked from the selector at the top of the window, and the line under the composer says the conversation stays on your machine, with no telemetry, ever. A model through your Ollama account, a system:: tag, runs there, and the line changes to say your prompts are sent to the provider you selected. A bundled 4B (qwen3:4b) is included so it works on first launch; multi-step work like the game or the deck wants a 30B-class model or a cloud one. The walkthrough ran on kimi-k2.6:cloud, an open-weights model.

What leaves the Mac: your prompts, to a cloud model, while one is selected; title lookups to Watchmode, if you set a key. Nothing goes to Aletha: no account, no telemetry.

A Mac with Apple Silicon, macOS 12 or later, 8 GB of RAM and about 6 GB free; the download is 3.2 GB. Ollama installed, for any model beyond the bundled one. The bundled 4B works with nothing else on the machine. No account and no sign-up: you pay once, the license key arrives on the next page, and the app activates with it. If it isn't for you, email within 14 days for a refund.

Mac only right now. Windows or Linux: join the waitlist. How many people ask decides the order.