Sharpie

A macOS menu-bar app that turns lazy prompts into the prompt you should have written. Hit ⌘/, type a quick line, the rewrite streams in and lands on your clipboard, paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, Codex, or Perplexity.

Status: v0.1 — local prototype. Single window, hard-coded system prompt, BYOA. The build is unsigned; macOS Gatekeeper will warn the first time. Code signing, Homebrew tap, and a demo GIF land in v1.0.

Why

You're in Claude Code, ChatGPT, or Cursor. You start typing "fix the login bug" and you already know the model is going to ask three follow-up questions or, worse, hallucinate a context that doesn't exist. Sharpie is the third option: hit a hotkey, type your lazy input, paste the sharpened prompt back. Total time: under fifteen seconds.

The system prompt is the product

Sharpie's behavior lives in prompts/sharpen.md — that file is more important than any code in this repo. The Swift app is the delivery vehicle; the prompt is what makes it useful. PRs against prompts/sharpen.md are the highest-leverage contribution you can make.

The current prompt has been validated against 5 model families on the live OpenRouter API: 75 / 75 visibly-better rewrites. See Tests/prompt-eval.md for the full evaluation.

Run it

Requires macOS 14+ and Xcode 16+ (Swift 6 toolchain). Apple Silicon recommended.

git clone https://github.com/vikranthreddimasu/sharpie.git
cd sharpie
make app
open build/Sharpie.app

On first launch, Sharpie opens Settings automatically — paste an API key for either provider and you're done.

Provider	Default	Get a key
OpenRouter (default)	minimax/minimax-m2.7 — cheap SOTA-open	openrouter.ai/keys
Anthropic	Claude Sonnet	console.anthropic.com

The model picker fetches OpenRouter's full catalog (368+ models, 56+ providers) live each time Settings opens. Search by slug or name; the v0.1 default stays cheap-SOTA-open by design.

Keys

key	does what
⌘/ (configurable)	open Sharpie from anywhere
↩	submit (or dismiss when the rewrite is on screen)
⇧↩	newline in the input
⎋	dismiss
⌘Z	revert to your original input (after a rewrite)
⌘A / ⌘C / ⌘V / ⌘X	standard text editing in the input
⌘,	open Settings (when the menu is showing)

Privacy and security

• Keys live only in macOS Keychain. Never written to disk in plaintext, never logged, never sent anywhere except the provider you pick.
• Once a key is stored, it does not re-load into the UI. Settings shows 🔒 Stored in Keychain · Replace…. The Reveal toggle can only show a key you just typed — not a key you typed last week.
• Reveal auto-hides after 5 seconds.
• Outbound traffic is restricted to the configured provider's API. The model directory pulls from openrouter.ai/api/v1/models (no auth required); rewrites POST to either openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions or api.anthropic.com/v1/messages depending on the active provider.
• No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporter, no update checker. Zero phone-home. Updates ship via Homebrew once that lands in v1.0.

Contribute

The most valuable PR you can open is one that improves prompts/sharpen.md. To iterate locally:

# 1. Save an OpenRouter key in Sharpie → Settings…
# 2. Run the eval against a cheap default
bash scripts/eval-prompt.sh

# 3. Or pin a specific model
MODEL=qwen/qwen3.6-max-preview bash scripts/eval-prompt.sh

The harness reads your stored key from Sharpie's Keychain entry (one-time macOS approval). Output goes to stdout — eyeball each rewrite, edit prompts/sharpen.md, rerun. The bar is 15 of 20 rewrites visibly better than the originals; record any regression case in Tests/prompt-eval.md.

What we're deliberately not building

Sharpie is a sharp little tool, not a platform. From CLAUDE.md:

• No history, no favorites, no saved prompts. Every invocation is fresh.
• No floating pill, no always-visible UI. Hotkey + window is the interaction.
• No auto-detection of input fields, no injection into other apps. Clipboard is the bridge.
• No second mode. One excellent system prompt beats two mediocre ones.
• No accounts, no signup, no cloud sync.
• No telemetry of any kind.

For the full product spec and the autonomy contract, read CLAUDE.md.

Architecture

• Swift 6 / SwiftUI / AppKit, no Electron, no React, no third-party dependencies. Native menu-bar app via NSApp.setActivationPolicy(.accessory) plus LSUIElement=true in the bundled Info.plist.
• Global hotkey via Carbon RegisterEventHotKey — works without Accessibility permission and consumes the keystroke (no leakage to whatever app is focused).
• LLMProvider protocol with two conformers (OpenRouterProvider, AnthropicProvider). Adding a third — Ollama, Bedrock, whatever — is one new file.
• SSE streaming for both providers; tokens render into the output area as they arrive.
• System prompt bundled via SwiftPM resources, symlinked from prompts/sharpen.md so contributors edit one canonical file.

sharpie/
├── Package.swift            — SwiftPM (no .xcodeproj noise)
├── Makefile                 — make build / run / app / clean
├── prompts/sharpen.md       — the one file that matters most
├── Sources/Sharpie/         — Swift sources
├── Tests/prompt-eval.md     — the eval that gates the prompt
├── scripts/
│   ├── eval-prompt.sh       — prompt evaluation harness
│   ├── build-app.sh         — wrap release binary as Sharpie.app
│   └── generate-icon.swift  — programmatic AppIcon.icns
└── assets/AppIcon.icns      — generated app icon

License

MIT. See LICENSE.