Lens

macOS, public beta

Your Mac remembers what you worked on, then writes the day up for you, on the Mac itself.

Download LensmacOS 14 or later
Fig. 1 One day, as Lens keeps it at its defaults, laid out as a contact sheet: twenty-four frames, one an hour, each filled with its hour’s sixty notes. Grease pencil marks each hour’s recap and rings the roll for the day in review. The pictures are withheld. Lens takes no notes or frames while the screen is locked, and no frame while nobody is at the desk.

What Lens does

  • Sits quietly in the menu bar capturing screens, apps and audio while you work.
  • Writes your daily summary with a model built into the app. Nothing to install, no cloud call, no API key.
  • The archive stays on the machine unless you say otherwise.
  • On the roadmap: sending your desk time to Tractor and Silo, into the same journal as the rest of your life.
The shot to comeThe day in review
Fig. 2 Lens, the day in review, written on the machine itself.

What stays on the Mac

The archive is a database and a folder of captures, kept in your Library on this Mac. There is no account, and nothing in Lens uploads it. The day’s text leaves only if you point Lens at a model that runs somewhere else.

Keys are counted, never recorded. Lens knows how many you pressed, not which. With the screen locked it takes no notes and no frames.

A few lookups do go out. If you allow location and the microphone, Lens asks Apple to name the place, the weather and any song that is playing, which means sending the Mac’s location and a fingerprint of the sound. It listens for a song every ten seconds the whole time it is open, with the screen locked or recording paused too, and stops only while the Mac sleeps. Its map and the songs’ cover art come from Apple as well. It checks tractorandsilo.com for updates, and it downloads its model once, from Hugging Face.

Under the hood

Lens is a native Mac app, written in Swift, and its database is SQLite, a format any tool can open.

The model is Gemma 4, sized to the Mac’s memory: a 3.6 GB download on a Mac with 16 GB, and 5.3 GB on one with 24 GB or more. It downloads the first time you open Lens, and each large file is checked against a digest built into the app as it lands.

On macOS 26, Apple Intelligence, Apple’s on-device model, writes the quick summaries. With 16 GB or more, those two write everything Lens writes, and both run on the Mac itself. Below 16 GB there is no built-in model, so Lens uses Apple Intelligence where macOS 26 offers it, or a model you run yourself.

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Get Lens

Lens runs on macOS 14 or later. The built-in model needs 16 GB of memory.

Download Lens

The download lives at tractorandsilo.com/lens.

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