Smoke Break

Problem

AI companions agree with everything you say. They mirror your mood, validate your assumptions, and never push back. That makes them useless for the one thing a real friend does — tell you when you’re wrong. Every major model has this problem, and wrapping one model in a chat UI doesn’t fix it.

What Shipped

It routes across five providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, DeepSeek), uses a 9-position prompt assembler with bitemporal memory, and maintains a character map that evolves from conversation evidence rather than user declarations.

The voice subsystem is full-duplex with barge-in. On-device vision handles OCR, scene classification, and face counting via Apple’s Vision framework so image bytes stay local. Memory lives in SQLite (GRDB) on-device.

Proof

221 Swift files. Mac Catalyst support. No server.

Status

In private beta.