Made a macOS app that creates highly personal macOS apps. Works with models as small as Gemma 4 E2B

Apologies in advance as the video is demonstrating with GPT 5.4 mini (a local model would take too long for a video), however I’ve made the same app with Gemma 4 E4B.

Been working on an open source project for a while called Ironsmith. The gist is you can create highly personally macOS apps with just a prompt, and one of my main goals from the beginning was to get it to work with low end models like the Apple foundation and the Gemma series.

After a bunch of work and experimentation, I’m excited to finally release it!

It uses a custom agentic loop tailor made to work with small models with limited context. This means you can create very simple apps entirely on device with a Mac as limited as a 8gb MacBook Air.

I found that the secret sauce to making this work was just have the model generate the entire app in one go, and then run a bajillion formatting, linting and deterministic repairs until it makes something compileable. Turns out these little models are pretty decent at writing full apps if you fix all of their hallucinations and syntax errors.

That being said you will get higher quality apps and less chances for errors the better the model you build with. I find that Gemma 4 26b a4b gives the best balance here, but it does require at least 24gb memory.

You can use Ollama out of the box and also use all of your favorite local providers via an OpenAI compatible API. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are also available to connect to if you want to provide your own API key.

There’s also some more info on security and whatnot on this post if you’re curious: https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/s/dIXIXJzrcg

Here’s some links if you want to try it out:

Github: https://github.com/Jeidoban/Ironsmith

Website: https://ironsmith.app

Ironsmith is still very much in beta so please bear with me as I work out the bugs. Also feedback is very welcome, please let me know what you think!