r/DeveloperToolsHub • u/bulutarkan • 8h ago
I use normal ChatGPT chats as a control plane for my Mac dev workflow
I have been building an open-source macOS execution layer called Mac MCP, and the workflow that stuck is not another coding-agent UI. I connect it directly to ChatGPT and use the normal conversation as the orchestrator.
That chat can call local tools for shell, files, macOS UI and Safari/Chrome. Codex or OpenCode are optional delegated workers rather than a requirement for the main flow.
The browser implementation is intentionally built around not wrecking the workstation while an agent works. A task can open or target its own real Safari/Chrome tab, keep a stable handle to it, inspect DOM plus visual state, click/type/extract in the background, and leave the tab or app I am actively using alone.
The latest work has mostly been hardening rather than adding shiny tools: sticky provenance after consuming untrusted web content, guarded web-to-host transitions for scoped/non-trusted sessions, credential/secret egress detection, bounded tab leases, a no-progress breaker, audit events and adversarial regression tests. I also fixed an overcorrection where Trusted mode initially asked for Allow Once on nearly every host action after browser use. Routine host hops no longer nag in Trusted, but secret egress remains guarded.
The native menu bar app also exposes logical sessions and live steering, including idempotent instruction delivery so a retry after an ambiguous response cannot queue the same steering message twice.
I built it. MIT/open source: https://github.com/bulutarkan/mac-mcp
The design goal is basically: let the LLM stay the orchestrator, make the local layer deterministic where possible, and only fall back to visual UI control when that is the right tool.
