I think “uncanny” is a good way to describe everything about this tool. I can’t say really whether the app itself is on target or not, but I have a feeling that without an iPad/mobile terminal that it’s DOA anyway.
So, Linux gets a free pass for requiring chmod +x to run his tool, but needing to run xattr on MacOS is somehow worthy of an entire blog post to complain about it?
Serious question - Is it really true that Windows 11 will run an untrusted .exe without a warning?
My experience is quite a bit different than what the author is citing. I live just outside of Minneapolis, and have a bunch of friends who live in the city. I have never heard anyone express concern about what ICE is doing. The biggest worries are around commute disruptions due to protesters. It might be because this is a self-selected circle of white collar types, but I can say the report in this story is not universal.
Have you considered using the on-device Apple foundation models as a fallback/alternative to the remote APIs? There is of course Apple's SpeechTranscriber (which is likely faster and more power-efficient than Whisper), and also the permissiveContentTransformations guardrail which is specifically designed for your use case.
Unfortunately, IDE integration like this tends to be very prefill intensive (more math than memory). That puts Apple Silicon at a disadvantage without the feature that we’re talking about. Presumably the upcoming M5 will also have dedicated matmul acceleration in the GPU. This could potentially change everything in favor of local AI, particularly on mobile devices like laptops.