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Sidekins

a Mac companion that visits friends and does your work

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This is 1 of 80 launches in keyboards and input customization tools — see how it stacks up on momentum and crowding →

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Details

External ID
49935328
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Sidekins
Website domain
sidekins.com
Launched
Oct. 2, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
5
Upvotes percentile
0.11494252873563218
Tags
—
Fetched at
Oct. 6, 2026, 5:01 p.m.
Updated at
Oct. 6, 2026, 5:01 p.m.

Description

I'm a small indie developer, I've made a mac app called SidekinsIt is a small desktop character that you can design yourself(I call it a Kin/Sidekin) and lives around your screen and peeps from the side when not in use.It is a very social app, you can add your friends and chat with them using your Kin. It is an AI agent so you can ask in the main chat to delivery some message to your friend and it creates the message you want and animation using your Kin and goes to your friends desktop and speaks/act out your message.You can also ask it to help you "guide" through your mac, or any app, it moves and points around telling you how things work. There is also a "do" mode, this actually does things for you on your mac, like play this song on Spotify or add an iPhone 16 to my amazon cart.you can see the demos here on the website on what and how it does things : www.sidekins.comCurrently, it works on Mac with apple silicon, and has 300 free messages.Try it out, and connect with me on the app: @18kushaljain

Enrichment

Niche
keyboards and input customization tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Agent / copilot
Audience
Prosumer
AI stance
AI-native
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
desktop ai companion for mac users
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial While LLM vision APIs and messaging backends are accessible, writing a native macOS companion app that captures screens dynamically, draws over arbitrary windows, runs step-by-step UI automation, and syncs peer-to-peer desktop avatars requires native macOS systems engineering.

What it would actually take: The app requires a native Swift/macOS architecture using ScreenCaptureKit for zero-latency screen streaming, Accessibility APIs (AXUIElement) for reading UI hierarchies and driving click events, and a low-latency WebRTC or WebSocket sync server for multiplayer avatar interactions. The hard part is building reliable macOS desktop overlay rendering with click-through and coordinate mapping, alongside an agentic controller that parses unstructured screen UI to accurately guide or automate user clicks without crashing. This demands specialized Apple platform and accessibility engineering.

Discussion

3 comments analyzed.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 60 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #58 of 61 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 338 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a agent / copilot tool for Agriculture yet.