Yeah I think you hit on the head a good way to use it though. I'm not on MacOS but KDE has a little tool called krunner[1] that lets you perform simple tasks from a small pop-up on your desktop. It would be cool if I could do slightly agentic things from there with a local model like ask what the capital of Austria is, or what's the current exchange rate between two currencies.
replyThen save the heavy lifting for the big boys.
I've used Alfred[1] for many years on macOS, and more recently the PowerToys Command Palette[2] on Windows.
replyBoth are easily extensible, so you could certainly wire either up to the local (or hosted) LLM of your choice.
Side note: I just noticed the extension example in the Command Palette demo reel searches HN.
[1] https://www.alfredapp.com/
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/command-...