Show HN: Open-source local memory vault

Rafaelpta released litepipe, an open-source macOS app that captures everything a user sees, says, and hears on their computer into a local SQLite database with full-text search, making zero network calls and keeping all data on-device. The app, a fork of Screenpipe's MIT-licensed engine, transcribes meetings locally with Whisper, redacts PII, and lets AI agents query the memory folder directly.

A local memory of everything you have seen, said or heard while you work at your computer. It remembers your work. It stays on your Mac. It feeds your AI. Features features | Install install | How it works how-it-works | Architecture architecture | FAQ faq 0 network calls · 100% on device A Monday, as it was kept. Every tile is a screen the engine held on to, and the panel is the text it read off the one selected. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. You work all day and your agents still start from scratch. litepipe keeps a local memory of everything you do, hear, and see on your computer: meetings, videos, clicks, every app. It all lands in one folder on your Mac. Screenpipe built a solid capture engine and published it under MIT. litepipe is a fork that keeps that core evolving in the open, without the features that grew around it: no pipes, no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud sync. The work goes into simplicity, less weight, and safer guardrails on what gets captured. Bugs in the shared code go back upstream, as in issue 5531 https://github.com/screenpipe/screenpipe/issues/5531 and pull request 5532 https://github.com/screenpipe/screenpipe/pull/5532 . Meetings become transcripts. litepipe spots the call window and asks. One click, and the transcript is on your disk when the call ends. The microphone opens only for meetings you accept. The recording is deleted once it's text. Everything on screen is captured. Text comes from the accessibility tree, with OCR for what the tree can't see. Nothing leaves the Mac. Whisper and pyannote run on device, and the only socket is the app talking to its own engine. One folder holds it all. SQLite with full text search, so your agent reads it directly. Download litepipe.dmg https://rafaelpta.github.io/litepipe/install/?download=1 , drag it to Applications, launch. Signed and notarized by Apple. To audit or change the code. Needs Xcode. The engine ships prebuilt; rebuilding it needs Rust and CMake, see crates/ . git clone https://github.com/Rafaelpta/litepipe cd litepipe/apps/litepipe-mac ./build-app.sh release The engine alone, no app. Captures into ~/.litepipe , local API on 127.0.0.1:3030, control C stops it. No meeting banner, no microphone gate, and the permissions go to your terminal. curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Rafaelpta/litepipe/main/headless.sh | bash The engine reads what you're working on through the accessibility tree, the layer assistive technology uses: like HTML, for every app. OCR fills the gaps the tree can't see: video, games, remote desktops. Voice is transcribed locally with Whisper and grouped by speaker. Everything lands in SQLite with full text search, so you can query it, search it, or point your AI agent at the folder and ask what you agreed to, planned, or missed. Screen and voice take separate paths, both end as searchable text in the same database, and everything is redacted before it settles. php flowchart LR SCR "Screen<br/ all day" -- STT "Screen to text<br/ accessibility tree + OCR" MIC "Voice<br/ meetings you accept" -- VTT "Voice to text<br/ Whisper, after the call" STT -- PII "PII redaction<br/ seconds later, overwritten in place" VTT -- PII PII -- DB "~/.litepipe/db.sqlite<br/ full text search" VTT -. "audio deleted once transcribed" .- X "no voice file remains" | Step | Detail | |---|---| | Capture | Event driven: an app switch, click, scroll stop, or typing pause triggers a screenshot paired with the accessibility tree; idle fallback when nothing happens; audio in 30 second chunks with 2 second overlap | | Screen to text | The accessibility tree arrives with the frame; OCR fills its gaps seconds behind, in a background queue. Stopping the engine drops whatever is still queued | | Meetings | Window titles plus browser URLs from captured frames; banner within about 10 seconds of joining, mic on about 3 seconds after you accept | | Voice to text | Whisper large v3 turbo quantized, Metal retranscribes the meeting after the call on audio normalized to -16 LUFS; transcript ready about 11 minutes after the call ends | | PII redaction | Seconds after each item lands, on this Mac: all text is cleaned, secret regions in screenshots painted black, the original overwritten in place. Voice audio is deleted once transcribed. Details under Privacy controls | | Cleanup | Voice audio deleted after transcription, within the hour; system audio kept 7 days; frames 30 days; text and index kept | Capture isn't all or nothing. What ships today: Private windows are never captured. Safari, Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, and Firefox. Password managers are never captured. 1Password, Bitwarden, LastPass, Dashlane, KeePassXC, and Keychain Access. Any app or site can be excluded. Settings, Privacy takes two lists, one of websites and one of apps. An excluded window never reaches the capture buffer, so no frame and no text of it exists. Capture stops when you want. One shortcut pauses everything, hours can be set to a schedule, and DRM video pauses it on its own. Secrets are redacted. On by default: keys, cards, and passwords become labels in text and black boxes in screenshots, and the original is overwritten. Under the hood: 46 deterministic patterns run first, an ONNX model on the Apple Neural Engine catches what patterns can't, and a second model finds secrets in the pixels and paints them solid black rather than blurred, since a blur can be undone. What was captured can be deleted. Settings, Data shows how much litepipe holds and deletes the last hour, the last day, a period you pick, or everything, files included. The local API does the same for scripts. The whole memory can be locked. The vault encrypts database and media with a key derived from your password, held only on your machine. Everything runs in two processes on your machine, and what they may write is checked twice: before capture, and before it settles on disk. Every claim below can be checked from a shell on your own machine. flowchart LR IN "Screen, screen text, system audio<br/ Microphone only in meetings you accept" -- G1 G1{"Checked before capture<br/ private windows, password managers,<br/ your app and site lists, pause, schedule"} G1 -- |"blocked"| NONE "Nothing is written<br/ no frame, no text" G1 -- |"allowed"| CAP "Captured and transcribed<br/ on this machine" CAP -- G2 "Checked after capture<br/ secrets redacted in text and pixels<br/ voice audio deleted once transcribed" G2 -- DISK "~/.litepipe<br/ db.sqlite, media, logs" DISK -- APP "litepipe.app" DISK -- AGT "your AI agent" | Component | Stack | Role | |---|---|---| | litepipe.app | Swift, AppKit, SwiftUI | Notch companion, meeting detection and consent, mic gate, timeline, settings | | engine | Rust | Screen and audio capture, VAD, transcription, diarization, redaction, SQLite, local HTTP API | The app spawns the engine with posix spawn and disclaims responsibility transfer, so it stays the TCC responsible process: the permission prompts and grants belong to litepipe.app, and one set covers both processes. Kill the app and the engine goes with it. macOS permissions used: Screen Recording capture , Accessibility screen text and UI events , Microphone only while a meeting you accepted is running . Everything lives in one folder, ~/.litepipe . Browse it with open ~/.litepipe . | Your data | Where it lives | |---|---| | Screen captures, the images | data/<date / as JPEG frames plus one compacted .mp4 per monitor | | Screen text read by OCR | db.sqlite , table ocr text , one row per captured frame | | Voice transcripts | db.sqlite , table audio transcriptions | | Meetings and their transcripts | db.sqlite , tables meetings and meeting transcript segments | | Raw audio | data/<date / , one file per device; meeting microphone audio is deleted once transcribed, the text is what remains | | Keyboard and UI activity | db.sqlite , tables ui events and elements | | App and engine logs | app.log and engine-app.log , lifecycle events only, no captured content | Nothing is encrypted at rest by default: FileVault covers the disk, and the vault /vault/ locks the database and media behind a password when you turn it on. Settings, Data shows the folder's size and deletes by period, from the last hour to all of it. Removing ~/.litepipe by hand works too; the app rebuilds an empty one on the next launch. One listening socket: the engine on 127.0.0.1:3030 , writes authenticated with a key generated at install time. The app is the only client; it calls meetings/start , meetings/stop , meetings/status , audio/start , audio/stop , and health , and reads history straight from SQLite. Confirm with lsof -nP -iTCP -sTCP:LISTEN | grep screenpipe or a network monitor. Models are downloaded once on first run and then cached: Whisper and a voice activity model for transcription, and, while secret redaction is on, an image redactor 52 MB, ~/.screenpipe/models/rfdetr v12.onnx and a text redactor 159 MB, ~/.screenpipe/models/v45 phase5 pruned/ . | What you want to audit | Where it lives | |---|---| | Engine spawn, flags, restart, mic gate | apps/litepipe-mac/Sources/litepipe/Engine.swift | | Meeting detection, consent, cleanup | apps/litepipe-mac/Sources/litepipe/MeetingWatcher.swift , MeetingPrompt.swift | | Privacy settings and exclusion lists | apps/litepipe-mac/Sources/litepipe/Settings.swift | | Screen capture and window filtering | crates/screenpipe-screen/ , crates/screenpipe-capture/ | | Accessibility text and private window detection | crates/screenpipe-a11y/ | | Audio, VAD, transcription | crates/screenpipe-audio/ | | Secret redaction, text and image | crates/screenpipe-redact/ | | Storage, schema, retention | crates/screenpipe-db/ , crates/screenpipe-engine/src/retention.rs | | HTTP API and routes | crates/screenpipe-engine/src/server.rs , src/routes/ | | Area | Spec | |---|---| | Screen capture | ScreenCaptureKit, event driven: captures when the screen changes, idle fallback when it doesn't; all monitors, every on screen app | | Screen text | Accessibility tree extraction; OCR fallback for video, games, remote desktops | | Audio capture | System audio continuous; microphone only during confirmed meetings; 30 second chunks with 2 second overlap | | Meeting detection | Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams native and web , FaceTime; window titles plus browser URLs from captured frames; banner within about 10 seconds | | Meeting end | Automatic about 30 seconds after the meeting windows disappear; stop button; shortcut | | Transcription | Whisper large v3 turbo, quantized, Metal; audio normalized to -16 LUFS; full meeting context; transcript about 11 minutes after the call ends | | Speaker separation | pyannote segmentation and voice embeddings | | Secret redaction | On by default; 46 deterministic patterns plus ONNX models on the Apple Neural Engine text and image ; labels in text, solid black boxes in screenshots, source overwritten | | Capture exclusions | Private browser windows, password managers, and the app and domain lists from Settings; excluded windows never reach the capture buffer | | Storage | SQLite with FTS5 at ~/.litepipe/db.sqlite ; media in ~/.litepipe/data | | Retention | Voice audio deleted after transcription, within the hour; system audio 7 days; frames 30 days; text and index kept | | Local API | REST on 127.0.0.1:3030 with a per install key; the same API the app uses | | Telemetry | Disabled; the engine logs "telemetry is disabled" at startup | | Offline | Fully functional without network after the one time model download on first run | | Diagnostics | Engine lifecycle log at ~/.litepipe/app.log | | Distribution | Developer ID, hardened runtime, notarized, stapled DMG 69 MB ; installed app 151 MB | | Platform | macOS on Apple Silicon | | License | MIT, full source | Does any audio or screen data leave my machine? No. The engine downloads its models on first run; after that the only network socket is the app talking to its own engine on 127.0.0.1. No telemetry, no crash reporting, no updater. What happens to the recording of my voice? It's deleted within the hour and the transcript stays. A voice recording is the most sensitive file on the disk: minutes of it can clone a voice, and an hour of meetings is about 25 MB of audio against 50 KB of text. Which meeting apps are detected? Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, native and web, plus FaceTime. Detection reads window titles and browser URLs from captured frames. How do I keep something out of the memory? Four ways. Private browser windows are skipped on their own. Any app or site goes on the ignore list. The shortcut pauses everything. And anything already captured can be deleted by period in Settings, Data. Is the data encrypted? FileVault covers the disk, on by default in macOS. The vault adds a lock on the database and media, behind a key derived from your password. Transparent encryption during capture is on the roadmap. How much disk does it use? System audio is kept 7 days and screen frames 30 days, both cleaned up on their own. Text and the index stay, and they're small. Settings, Data shows the current size. Can my AI agent read the data? Yes, that's the point. Plain SQLite and media files in ~/.litepipe . Point an agent at the folder and query it. How do I delete everything? Settings, Data, delete all context. Or quit the app and remove ~/.litepipe . Early beta. Native macOS on Apple Silicon. Open an issue when something breaks. Bug reports and fixes are welcome. The direction is narrow on purpose: keep it local, keep it stripped to the basics, and make the capture engine better. litepipe is MIT. It adapts open source code from Screenpipe and Clicky, both MIT, and bundles FFmpeg. The notices are in LICENSE.md /Rafaelpta/litepipe/blob/main/LICENSE.md , NOTICE /Rafaelpta/litepipe/blob/main/NOTICE , and THIRD PARTY NOTICES.md /Rafaelpta/litepipe/blob/main/apps/litepipe-mac/THIRD PARTY NOTICES.md .