Meckie OS and companion mode
For most of its life, Meckie lived in full screen. A face on a display, a kiosk you walked up to and talked to. That works well when Meckie is the thing you are doing. It works badly when Meckie is supposed to be around while you do something else.
Companion mode is the answer to that. Meckie shrinks down to a small character that sits on your desktop, stays out of the way, and is there when you turn to him. Same memory, same voice, same skills. Different posture.
What is happening in the video
That is one take, start to finish.
Meckie says good morning. Then the part worth watching closely: a cover letter that reads timid and apologetic gets handed to him with a single instruction, "make this cover letter sound more confident." He reads the document, rewrites it, and saves the result.
Three things are true underneath that beat, and they are worth stating plainly.
- He reads the real file. Not text pasted into a chat box. The .docx is opened and parsed.
- He writes a real file back, as a new document beside the original. Meckie never overwrites what you already had. Run it twice and you get a second copy, not a lost draft.
- The gesture is the consent. Meckie reads a document because you handed it to him. Nothing is indexing your drive in the background.
That last one matters more than it sounds. An assistant that can touch your files is only comfortable to live with if the boundary is obvious. Dragging a file onto a character is about as obvious as a boundary gets.
Two modes, one Meckie
Companion mode is half of it. The other half is kiosk mode, the full screen face with the app launcher. Meckie OS is what makes those one product instead of two apps that share a name.
Switch between them and nothing resets. The conversation carries. The memory carries. Music that was playing keeps playing, from the same point in the same song, because the playhead moves with you rather than starting the track over.
When something deserves a bigger canvas, a game, a story, an app you built by asking for it, companion mode hands off and the kiosk takes it from there.
Apps, and why every one of them is certified
Meckie OS has an app platform. Some apps ship with it, some come from the marketplace, and some you build yourself by describing what you want.
Every app in the marketplace is certified before it can be listed, through LastProtocol. That is not a review queue with somebody skimming screenshots. Each app is addressed by the hash of its own contents, analyzed statically, and then actually run in a sandbox to watch how it behaves: whether it tries to send your data somewhere it did not declare, whether it quietly reaches for more than it asked for, whether it acts differently when it thinks nobody is watching.
Apps that want real capabilities, network access, files, notifications, scheduling, declare them up front, and you approve them per app. If an app later broadens what it wants, it has to ask you again rather than inheriting the old answer.
If an app is revoked after you installed it, it stops working on your machine. That check runs daily and again every time Meckie starts.
Where it runs
Meckie runs as a native app on macOS, Windows, and Linux. There are Raspberry Pi and Jetson builds if you want him in physical hardware with a camera and a speaker.
The brain is your choice. By default it routes to a hosted model. You can bring your own API key instead. Or you can point Meckie at a local model through Ollama and keep the conversation on your own machine, optionally letting it fall back to the hosted model only for the things the local one cannot handle.