Side
A little AI chat panel that lives beside your Mac's Dock
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This is 1 of 179 launches in ChatGPT extensions and MCP tooling — see how it stacks up on momentum and crowding →
128 other launches read as similar to this one →
Details
- External ID
- 1271658
- Source
- PH
- Company
- —
- Product
- TeX Side Preview in VSCode
- Website domain
- producthunt.com
- Launched
- Oct. 8, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 72
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.97
- Tags
- Mac, Productivity, Artificial Intelligence, GitHub
Description
Side is a tiny AI chat panel that sits right beside your Mac's Dock: one glance away, never in the way. • Fits the gap next to your Dock, floats above other windows, works across Spaces and full-screen apps • Switch providers, models and reasoning levels in one conversation • Bring your own account: sign in with ChatGPT or use an API key • Compact composer that expands to full height when needed • ⌘⇧Space to show or hide Free and open source (MIT).
Enrichment
- Niche
- ChatGPT extensions and MCP tooling
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Agent / copilot
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- AI-native
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- desktop ai chat assistant for mac users
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial Building the chat interface is trivial, but a native macOS panel that dynamically docks, avoids Spaces transitions, and floats properly requires low-level AppKit/macOS window management expertise.
What it would actually take: Developed using Swift and AppKit (`NSPanel`, `NSWindow`) hooking into CoreGraphics/Accessibility APIs to query Dock position, screen frame, and manage window levels (`floatingWindowLevel` across all mission control Spaces). The difficult piece is edge-case handling of multiple monitors, Spaces animations, and Dock hide/show events that AI code generators routinely hallucinate.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 128 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 129 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 332 days after the earliest competitor.
- Sider Omni Sidebar · ph · 2026-09-18 · 301 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Sidestream · hn · 2026-01-06 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- AI ChatBot : Ask Anything 5.6 · ph · 2026-09-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Proto-Mind · ph · 2026-09-18 · 60 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- right-panel · github · 2026-09-18 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- SideMini · ph · 2026-09-26 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Wink AI · ph · 2026-10-08 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Sidekins · hn · 2026-10-02 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42