Thread by @andrewmccalip

A desktop AI war is brewing

Introducing ShiftKeys, AI that lives in your OS, not your browser.

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shiftkeys.ai

Everyone fought to own AI in browsers and phones. The desktop, where real work happens, got ignored. ShiftKeys fixes that.

Select text → instant context.
Both shifts → AI appears.
Tab → optionally start new conversation
Switch models anytime.
Answers in <700ms.
Enter → response pastes itself.

Works over every application, in every text box. No more hunting for tabs. No more copy-paste gymnastics.

❌Apple had one job, put AI in spotlight
❌Microsoft, don’t even get me started on your search bar
❌Google is paying $20bil to own the url bar

Meanwhile I’m over here essentially banging rocks together in my spare time and ended up with a better user experience.

Retweet if Apple should copy this

I didn’t build this for the coders; they have enough cool tools.

I built it for the corporate athletes (credit @tbpn). The ones in the Confluence trenches. The PMs fighting story point wars in Jira. It’s for every biz dev guy cranking emails, living their lives in Outlook and Slack.

“tighten this up”
“tweak this”
“spell check this”
“make less dumb”
"what's this term mean"
"make this less passive aggressive"

Let’s not pretend 50% of ChatGPT traffic isn’t these requests.

[L Shift] + [R Shift]

Everyone back off, the shifts are ours

I have fallen in love with this set of hot keys. It just hits different. There’s something viscerally satisfying about pressing them both at the same time. I want these to be *the* keys to invoke the AGI.

500ms feels like magic

The first time it worked, I just sat there, like ohh, this is obviously the future.

Meanwhile everyone's racing to make models 1% smarter on MMLU. I'd rather make them instant. @CerebrasSystems and @GroqInc serving Llama at <500ms changed everything. Your brain doesn't disengage. You stay in flow. Once you experience it, O3 will feel like dial-up.

So let’s talk about what it does.

Model agnostic: Choose 300+ from our friends at @OpenRouterAI

Model switching: Models can be switched mid-conversation

Context pile: Selected text gets auto added to context

Crazy speed: Latency of ~500 milliseconds with Cerebrus & Groq models

Instance paste: Smash enter to auto paste your reply

Always on top: Invoke anywhere, over any program

Vision: Optionally capture full screen and add to context

Keyboard shortcuts:

[L Shift] + [R Right] = invokes the window
[Tab] = optionally starts new conversation
[Enter] = Submit prompt
[Enter] = Auto pastes reply
[ESC] = Leaves reply on clipboard

Confession: I vibe coded this whole thing. Website, app, DMG and EXE installers, backend server, all of it.

No, I didn’t oneshot anything. Anyone who says that is lying or baiting. What that really means is I embraced the new style of programming, exquisite definition of goals and requirements in plain English. Spending 15 minutes writing a prompt before unleashing an hour of agentic work. Honestly @karpathy nailed it. The future is you + 50 agents.

A HUGE shout out to @cursor_ai, my favorite IDE. A heartfelt thank you to their whole team. You’ve made one of those magical pieces of software that enables the dreamers and the innovators.

Why???

Insatiable curiosity or just poor impulse control? Honestly, building stuff is fun. I like to wade into the deep end of subjects I’m not qualified for and come out the other side with a story and a new skill. These hobbies keep me technically sharp and relevant in a world where skills are the least durable they’ve ever been.

LK99
Twitter scraping-gate
Doomscroller.xyz
doge-fin.com
Projectbob.xyz

Wired had a hilarious quote in their LK99 interview, which I have come to like.

“McCalip preferred not to dwell, but instead chose to focus on what he had set out to do: making the thing”.

So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to build the thing.

Did you raise?

😂😂

What, for this hobby?

My friend, my fellow X technology brother. You can just do things.

You’re living in an era of abundance the world has never known.
Code that flows like water.
Models that reason.
APIs that self-document.
Infra that scales itself.
All available for the price of a meal.
And yet you speak of decks. Of markets. Of pre-seed.
Psssh. Embarrassing.

This is an art piece, a flex of what’s possible on a few nights and weekends.

I build because I genuinely can’t imagine not building. Plus, I needed a tool to fix my SQL query typos.

Fair warning: ShiftKeys isn't perfect.

You're beta testing my first shipping software ever
Desktop apps are FREAKING HARD
You'll find bugs I didn't know were possible
You'll break things in ways I can't imagine
You’re testing it on my own dime; be nice to my budget

But we'll fix it together. Live on X (the everything app). Post a screenshot and tag me in a post when it breaks. I’ll get to it after my day job building spaceships.

A huge thanks to my (unknowing) partners on this project:

@Apple @Microsoft - motivation consultants
@cursor_ai - did 98% of the work
@CerebrasSystems @GroqInc - speed dealers
@OpenRouterAI - model sommelier
@Google - a not-evil landlord
@Meta - open source king
@OpenAI - started the party
@stripe - ferrari of payments
@Cloudflare - fort knox for a lemonade stand
@X - where hobbies become problems
@tryramp - future sponsor

Help me out by screenshotting the most niche application you've used it for!

Debugging VBA macros in a grain elevator's custom weighing system built in Excel 2003.
Fixing syntax in your Matlab FMINCON function calls.
Formatting shortwave radio logs in a ham radio desktop app.
Fixing gcode work offset syntax.
Patching up Fortran array references inside Abaqus pre-processor.

I'll RT the wildest ones.

Five years from now, this will feel obvious.

Like of course AI lives in your OS. Of course it's instant. Of course it works everywhere. You'll forget there was a time when you had to:

Open a browser
Find the right tab
Copy your text
Paste it
Wait 10 seconds
Copy the response
Paste it back

I'm just here to make sure it ends a little sooner.

Please RT if:

Big Tech should implement this (they won't)
You're exhausted by viral marketing and brain rot
You miss when people built things for fun
You support deeply unprofitable passion projects

shiftkeys.ai

Drop a comment, and I’ll DM you a code for free unlimited use for a month.

No signups or accounts needed for free tier. Just download and start using it! I’ll pick up the tab for a few dozen queries a day per person, until my hobby fund is bankrupt 😂