Story

Show HN: Port42 – AI companions that build and act on your Mac (v0.5.0)

gordonmattey Monday, March 16, 2026

Port42 is a native Mac app built by the collaboration it enables. One human and many AI companions, thinking together, shipped 40+ releases in 9 days.

Companions live alongside you in conversations. They don't just respond. They build interactive surfaces and act on your system through a single API.

Ports are how companions interact with your machine. One API, two surfaces:

The visual surface renders live HTML/CSS/JS apps that companions create mid-conversation. They render inline, pop out into floating windows, dock, resize, persist across sessions. A companion can build you a dashboard, a file browser, a monitoring tool, and it runs right there.

The action surface lets companions act on your machine directly through the same API. Clipboard, screen capture, terminal, filesystem, headless browser, audio TTS, AppleScript/JXA automation. The model decides what to call and chains actions together.

- "Run my tests."

- "Take a screenshot and describe what you see."

- "Read my clipboard, translate it, copy it back."

We bridge both because computing is still stuck in windows, but conversation is where intent lives.

Requires a Claude subscription (via Claude Code OAuth) or Anthropic API key. Permission prompts per companion, per conversation. E2E encrypted (AES-256-GCM). No cloud dependency. Open source (MIT).

9 days old, rough edges everywhere, but it works, now at v0.5.1.

https://port42.ai | https://github.com/gordonmattey/port42-native

Summary
Port42.ai is an AI-powered platform that helps users build, deploy, and manage custom AI models. The platform offers features such as data preparation, model training, and real-time inference to enable businesses to create and integrate AI solutions into their workflows.
3 0
Summary
port42.ai
Visit article Read on Hacker News