One of the things I’ve been surprisingly pleased with is how good the macOS app is for ChatGPT. I don’t use it often, but when I do, it’s really nice to have it be able to peek into a document open in BBEdit, or look at the terminal to see the output of a command. I don’t know if these are pre-baked integrations or are using some sort of universal AppleScript interface to do the magic, but it does kind of feel like that: magic.

It’s even had me reduce my usage of competing tools like Claude or local LLMs like Ollama because I don’t have to copy/paste everything in and out of the chat. I can just say: “Hey, does this look right?” and ChatGPT will look at the document (even just highlighted segments) and offer it’s thoughts on it. Very handy. Avoiding the clunky copy/paste routine is probably the experience programmers are getting when they use tools like Cursor that integrate right into their IDE. It’s great!

Reading into the documentation, it looks like it might be a bit of incantation using the Accessibility settings. This means that your app probably needs to have accessibility compatibility that exposes a certain level of actions the system can read. Certainly better than trying to manually grab the data out of the app with bespoke rules for each. It also doesn’t look like this is supported at all on Windows, which I don’t think exposes the same kind of universal accessibility API.

For all the doom and gloom going on right now in the world, especially about Apple and their floundering “Apple Intelligence”, it’s nice to see some good things floating about and working well. And if Apple decides to open Siri up to using any of the publicly available models, I’d be just as happy. So long as we can get deeper control over where it goes and privacy guarantees about how it’s used (if at all), then I don’t see the problem. Yeah, their plan for Apple Intelligence seemed sound, but it doesn’t seem like it worked out in practice. The best thing is to admit that they didn’t have the chops to get it right, and either scrap it or hand it off to someone who does.