A private, encrypted desktop app for auditing your days as a founder, student, and human. Claude can read and write all of it.
Live demo. Click Run to load the real app and use it right here, or open it full-screen.
Cortex is a macOS desktop app that pulls a founder's whole life into one private dashboard: habits, sprints, reading, CRM, calendar, coursework, finances, go-to-market state, and live founder metrics (GitHub commits, Lemon Squeezy MRR, Vercel deploys, Supabase signups). Everything is stored locally and encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, with the master key held in the macOS Keychain. A built-in web server on port 3456 makes the same dashboard reachable from a phone over Tailscale as a PWA.
The interesting part is the seam to AI. Cortex ships a Model Context Protocol server with 51 tools across 18 groups that proxies the app's local API, so Claude can read and write habits, journal entries, contacts, calendar events, and founder metrics directly. On top of that sits Opportunity Radar, a scheduled, prompt-injection-safe pipeline that scrapes social feeds on a VM, has a tool-less LLM classify and score them against an editable profile, then ingests the survivors into the dashboard with identity-level dedup. You steer it in plain language with hunt orders, and a sibling tracker watches fast-growing GitHub projects with stars and forks charts. It is a personal tool built to production standards, not a demo.
Founders and students juggle habits, revenue, deploys, coursework, contacts, and a firehose of opportunities across a dozen disconnected tools, with no single private place to see and audit it all. Cortex is a local-first, encrypted desktop dashboard that unifies those signals and exposes them to an AI agent.
cortexappThe Electron 41 + React 19 macOS desktop app: around 20 feature modules (daily, habits, founder, CRM, finances, courses, GTM) on an OLED-black Tailwind v4 UI, persisted through Electron IPC, then the HTTP API, then localStorage.
cortex-mcp-servermcpA 51-tool MCP server across 18 groups that proxies the app's localhost:3456 API, so Claude can read and write habits, journal, contacts, calendar, GTM, and founder metrics over stdio or an optional --http transport.
opportunity-radarworkerA launchd-scheduled pipeline that scrapes feeds on a Lima VM, has a tool-less claude -p call score them against an editable profile, then validates and dedupes survivors by apply-URL, title, and host before POSTing them back to the app.
electron main (:3456 web server)serviceThe Electron main process owns the encrypted data directory, the tray, and context-isolated preload IPC, and runs a Tailscale-gated HTTP server on port 3456 that serves the same dashboard as a PWA to the phone.
crypto container (electron/crypto.ts)libraryEncrypts every data file with AES-256-GCM in a custom binary format (CTX1 magic, version byte, 12-byte per-write IV, 16-byte auth tag), keyed by a 32-byte master key held behind Electron safeStorage and the macOS Keychain.
integrations (electron/integrations)libraryFounder-metric clients for GitHub, Lemon Squeezy (MRR), Vercel, Supabase, the Mars Obsidian journal vault, and Paperclip, feeding the weekly-audit rollup shown in the UI and over MCP.