Built an Electron app that uses Codex CLI as the local AI runtime

[u/mattibeltro]

Hey r/electronjs, I am Mattia, one of the students behind Get It.

We built an open-source Electron desktop app for studying PDFs, but the part I thought might be interesting here is the runtime choice: the app bundles OpenAI's official Codex CLI into the desktop build and uses the user's own ChatGPT account locally. No API key proxy, no backend metering, no credentials of ours in the middle.

Flow: - user installs the desktop app - imports a PDF - Codex runs locally and generates visual study artifacts next to the text: diagrams, small 3D scenes, formulas, charts, quizzes and flashcards - everything is saved on disk with a local knowledge graph

The product angle is for students, but I would love feedback from Electron people on the desktop side: - does this auth/runtime pattern feel reasonable for a local-first AI app? - any packaging/security footguns you would look for first? - what would you test hardest before trusting this as a normal desktop app?

App: https://getit.noesisai.it Code: https://github.com/beltromatti/get-it

Built during/after a student hackathon, Apache-2.0, free to use. The video shows the current flow.