Gerty
The first thing that gets me about Gerty is how boring the setup sounds. It just installs on your Mac and runs. That's the whole move, and honestly that's what makes it interesting. Plenty of "private AI" tools talk a big game about encryption and compliance, but then you still end up routing your conversations through some vendor's endpoint. Gerty skips that theater entirely by staying on your hardware.
I think this lands hardest for solo founders and small teams who are past the napkin stage. You're drafting investor updates, debugging customer conversations, maybe even feeding it scraps of code that aren't public yet. You really don't want that material floating around someone else's logs. So the local model's real advantage is trust.
What I'd want to know next is the practical ceiling. Local models have real limits in speed and reasoning compared to the big hosted ones. If Gerty pulls off a smooth experience that doesn't feel like a downgrade, it could carve out a loyal niche. If it feels clunky, it'll stay a toy for privacy purists. The market is still wide open, and I'm curious to see who moves first to make local AI feel genuinely effortless.