Remember what you did today.
Understand and use Side.

A plain-language guide to Side's local capture and search, optional summaries, and separate MCP agent connection. It also covers installation and real questions you can ask.

0First, what is Side?

It is a personal record for the question, “Where did I see that yesterday?”

Imagine that yesterday you read a page in your browser, wrote a sentence in a notes app, and checked something in another app. Days later, you cannot remember the exact title or address. You can ask an agent connected to Side to find it. Side records text and activity from allowed windows on your Mac so you can find them with their sources. If you configure a summary provider and consent to sending evidence, it can also make daily summaries.

Side can observe the active window of Mac apps as well as browser tabs. This does not mean it remembers everything on your Mac. It needs permission to read a window, and it does not observe excluded apps or websites or password fields. When accessible text is unavailable, optional screen text recognition can help.

1Side in one sentence

Think of a personal notebook paired with a library catalog.

2How activity becomes a memory

Capture and search run locally. Summaries and agent connections are separate choices.

Side starts with the window you are currently using. Accessibility permission lets it read available text and window information. Input Monitoring helps it notice interactions and when a typed sentence is complete. If a screen has no readable text, and you allow it, OCR (screen text recognition) extracts text from the screen. Side does not keep the image as a record.

Raw records go into an encrypted local ledger (a time-ordered log). Side masks known password, token, and card-number patterns first, but rules cannot catch every sensitive value. It creates daily summary pages and a search index as separate files. Raw captures are kept for 14 days by default; summaries remain separately until you delete them.

3How does Side find things?

A time, a word, or a topic can be enough to start a search.

Tell Side roughly when you saw something and any words you remember. It can search related captures or browser visits. For example, ask for “the restaurant booking page I saw yesterday.” If it finds only a browser visit, you can see the visit time, title, and address, but not the page's full text.

If you do not remember the exact wording, try a topic such as “the refund policy I looked at last week.” This can help when daily summaries were actually created. Side cannot find a screen it did not record because of permissions or settings. Check the original source again when the answer matters.

4How do I ask an agent?

Keep Side running and ask a connected agent in everyday language.

Side provides MCP (a way to connect AI agents to tools) so an agent can search local records. Register Side's tools separately in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Grok Build, Aside, or another client. Installing Side or configuring summaries does not connect them, and Side.app must be running when you ask.

Aside is one compatible MCP client for Side's tools. Register Side in Aside's Settings → MCP → Add server screen, with name side, command /Applications/Side.app/Contents/Resources/side, and argument mcp. Aside then calls Side on the same Mac; records are not automatically synced to another device. If you installed Side elsewhere, use that app's actual executable path.

You can also revisit sources for legal work or reconstruct project time for a timesheet. Check legal quotations, dates, amounts, OCR-read figures, and final billable time against original sources and your actual work records.

5Install and set up Side

Build the source on your Mac, then put the app in Applications.

Side is currently distributed as source; there is no prebuilt app to download and open. Clone the source from GitHub, then run the commands below in a terminal. You need macOS 14 or later, Bun, Xcode Command Line Tools, and a SQLite dylib with FTS5 and extension loading. The build script looks for Homebrew's SQLite; if your copy is elsewhere, set SIDE_SQLITE_LIBRARY to its path. The build also bundles the MiniLM model, so it may need internet access the first time.

On first launch, Side guides you through Accessibility and Input Monitoring. Screen Recording is optional for OCR when a screen has no readable text. Browser Automation is the macOS permission Side uses to read the current tab URL in supported browsers. Already allowed means no new approval prompt is needed.

Capture and search do not need a summary model. For summaries, enter a provider API key, or sign in to the official Codex CLI with codex login for ChatGPT and select OpenAI (Codex login) in Side. For Claude Code, use claude auth login and select its login option. A Codex login stored only in Keychain is not currently supported. These summary-provider choices are separate from MCP agent registration. Side uses real activity for summaries only after you enable “Send evidence to this provider” for that provider. Use a CLI login for Side summaries at your own risk; check each service's terms and usage limits.

You choose your summary providers. For example, set MiMo 2.6 Pro as primary and MiniMax M3 as fallback. A particular summary can still fail even with a working connection. If history looks empty, check whether the 10-minute window has ended and whether summaries are ready. For failed work, check the connection, click Retry failed summaries, then Refresh summaries.

Side calls the summary model for active 10-minute windows and six-hour rollups. Leaving it on all day can use millions of input tokens, and the app currently has no daily token cap. If cost matters, check usage with your model provider, pause capture while away, or turn off Send evidence to this provider. Turning off evidence sending also stops new summaries.

6Retention, deletion, and privacy

You choose what Side remembers and for how long.

From the menu bar, pause capture for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, one hour, or until you resume it yourself. Add apps and websites you do not want observed to the exclusions list in settings. Choose a raw-capture retention period of 1, 3, 7, 14, or 30 days; the default is 14 days. In settings, you can delete the last 10 minutes, the last hour, today's records, or all Side history.

Side stores its data on this Mac in ~/Library/Application Support/Side/. It masks known sensitive patterns before saving and encrypts sensitive columns of raw records, but no pattern list catches every secret. Summaries and daily pages remain readable text in local files. Deleting all Side history removes its raw records, summaries, and indexes and rotates the encryption key. Your browser's own history remains, and model API keys remain separately in macOS Keychain.