Higgins is a local assistant that lives in the menubar. A Qwen 2.5 7B model runs on-device via MLX, a SQLite triple store remembers things across sessions, and a small collection of tools — AppleScript runners, EventKit bridges, gh CLI wrappers — lets him actually do work on the Mac. No cloud, no subscription, no data leaving the machine.

The name is a nod to Magnum P.I.’s reserved English major-domo. The vibe was aspirational; most of the engineering effort went into making sure he doesn’t cheerfully hallucinate your dentist appointment into 2023.

I grew up fascinated by projects like GNUStep, Haiku, Etoile, Wine, and ReactOS. Engineering feats, all of them. They reverse-engineer or reimplement entire operating system APIs so that software written for one platform can run on another. And they almost always end up in the same place: impressive technically, starved for contributors, forever chasing a moving target they can never quite catch.

I never liked the state of the Linux desktop either. Not because it’s bad per se, but because it’s fragmented. A KDE app on GNOME looks alien. Firefox rolls its own everything. GTK and Qt will never agree on anything. Every toolkit draws its own widgets, manages its own text rendering, handles its own accessibility story. The result is a desktop that feels like a coalition of independent projects rather than a coherent system.

iTunes Match worked great for years: you uploaded your library, Apple matched what it could, and you had access to everything from any device. But Apple is clearly moving everyone toward Apple Music, and iTunes Match has been slowly rotting. The writing was on the wall.

I didn’t want to subscribe to Apple Music. I wanted to keep my library, my ratings, my play counts, my playlists, all the metadata accumulated over 20 years. So I built my own streaming setup: a Go backend that serves the library over HTTP, and SwiftUI apps that play it on iOS, macOS, and tvOS.