apfel

Overview

apfel is a command-line tool that gives you access to the AI model already on your Mac through Apple Intelligence, at no cost. You can use it as a UNIX tool in shell scripts, run it as an OpenAI-compatible local server or chat with it in a small REPL. It can read files, PDFs and images you attach to a prompt.

Features

• Single prompts, streaming output and piped input
• Attach text files, PDFs and images, with on-device text extraction and OCR
• Code-only output, JSON output and schema-valid JSON through guided generation
• Token counting before large prompts
• OpenAI-compatible server on localhost, which can run in the background with brew services
• apfel --chat REPL for testing prompts or MCP servers

Requirements

• macOS 26 Tahoe or later
• Apple silicon (M1 or later)
• Apple Intelligence turned on
• To build from source: Command Line Tools with the macOS 26.4 SDK and Swift 6.3

Install

1. Install with Homebrew

   brew install apfel

Example

Pipe a diff in for a quick review: git diff HEAD~1 | apfel -f CONVENTIONS.md "Review this diff against our conventions".