How I Built Conduit: Giving Claude the Keys to My Mac (Safely)

The AI I work in every day — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor — is brilliant and completely blind to my actual life. It can't see the text from my kid's soccer coach, the email thread I forgot to answer, or the reminder that was due yesterday. All of that lives in Apple's apps on my Mac.

So I built Conduit — the MCP server for your Mac. It gives any MCP client a handle on Messages, Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes: brief you each morning, surface the follow-ups you'd have missed, and turn a conversation into the next reminder or calendar hold. No API keys, no account, and nothing leaves your Mac.

What It Does

Point Claude (or Cursor, or any MCP client) at Conduit and your assistant can suddenly do the things the demos always promised:

• Your morning brief — today's calendar, due reminders, unread Messages, and fresh Mail in one briefing
• Close the open loops — scan threads and mailboxes for questions you asked and asks you owe
• Capture straight to action — read the actual message, then create the reminder and the calendar hold
• Draft that you approve — replies drafted from the real thread in your voice; nothing sends until you confirm
• Your Friday wrap-up — reconstruct what actually got done this week from sent messages, completed reminders, and calendar
• Reach a whole group — message every soccer parent at once, behind its own toggle, with every group send logged

How It Works

Conduit is a macOS app that keeps a local mirror of your Apple apps and exposes them as MCP tools. Your AI client connects to Conduit over MCP, locally — the server binds to localhost, and there is no cloud copy.

That architecture is the whole point. Conduit itself never talks to any AI service. The only network calls the app ever makes are one-time license activation and update checks. Your messages, your mail, your calendar — all of it stays on your own machine.

The Safety Model Was the Real Design Problem

Handing an AI this much reach only works if you trust it, so most of the engineering went into control, not capability:

• Reading by default, writing by choice — out of the box your AI can only read; sending, creating, and deleting are enabled per-service in settings
• Confirm before send — queued sends go through a confirmation step: the AI proposes, you approve, then it goes; unapproved sends expire automatically
• Group send is its own switch — messaging a whole contact group is gated behind a separate toggle, and every group send is logged
• You can see everything — a running feed of every tool call: which tool, when, and whether it worked, so nothing happens off-screen

The Stack

A native macOS app (Electron shell, Python backend, local SQLite store) speaking MCP, with Railway hosting the only cloud pieces: the site and the license server.

Try It

Conduit is a one-time purchase — $29.99, direct-download DMG, no subscription. If you already work in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or Cursor, it's the difference between an assistant that talks about your day and one that actually knows it. Details at the Conduit site.

-Mike

Built with: Electron, Python, SQLite, MCP, Railway