th-a59af5: Big Smooth desktop shell (Electron MVP)

[brentrager]

Problem

Big Smooth has no desktop app. You reach him through a browser PWA on the daemon's port or through a macOS-only menu-bar extra (SMOOTH_MENUBAR) — two half-answers to the same question.

Solution

A new desktop/ package: an Electron app that IS the Big Smooth desktop app. Electron over Tauri deliberately — one Chromium everywhere beats Tauri's per-OS webview fragmentation.

The daemon stays the engine; this is only the shell.

• src/daemon.ts — resolve + start + stop the native smooth-daemon. Resolution order mirrors th daemon (crates/smooth-cli/src/daemon_launcher.rs) with the packaged copy first: bundled resources → $SMOOTH_DAEMON_BIN → ~/.smooth/bin → PATH → cargo target dir (via cargo metadata, so a global build.target-dir works). It probes /health first and attaches to an already-running daemon (th up, launchd) rather than fighting it for the port — and only ever terminates a child it spawned itself.
• src/main.ts — window + tray. The window is a BrowserWindow on the daemon's /, which already serves smooth-web with the local auth token injected into index.html, so there is no renderer, preload, or IPC code in this package. Close hides to tray, Quit exits, single-instance lock, off-origin links open in the real browser.
• Tray — the th mark (rendered from images/smooth-icon.svg), with Open / Set Up (Calendar · Reminders · Messages · Full Disk Access, each handing the interactive th doctor --setup-* flow a terminal) / Quit.

Cross-platform throughout; the one mac-only branch is the Terminal.app shell-out, which falls back to a dialog elsewhere.

Verification

Smoke-tested on macOS with pnpm dev against the daemon already running on :8787:

• App launched, window rendered the real Big Smooth SPA (title Big Smooth — your always-on AI, signed in, model + status live) — confirmed by screenshot, not just by the process existing.
• Tray item present in the menu bar (1 status item on the Electron process).
• It attached to the running daemon rather than spawning one (no smooth-daemon child), and quitting the app left that daemon up — the intended asymmetry.
• pnpm test (2 node:test cases over addr parsing + binary resolution), tsc, oxfmt, oxlint all clean.

Not verified by me: the tray menu items under click (Set Up flows, Quit-from-tray) and any non-macOS run.

Deferred

Packaging and signing. electron-builder.yml is a working skeleton (mac/win/linux targets, extraResources pointing at a per-platform resources/<os>/smooth-daemon that nothing populates yet) — no certificates, notarization, or CI job. Windows/Linux are a config step, not a code change.

Pearl th-a59af5.

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[changeset-bot]

🦋 Changeset detected

Latest commit: 4c8d59b

The changes in this PR will be included in the next version bump.

This PR includes changesets to release 1 package

Name	Type
@smooai/smooth	Patch

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[brentrager]

Level-up: the Electron app is now the installable — plus one blocker

Shipped

• Bundled engine. pnpm stage-daemon stages smooth-daemon into resources/current/; electron-builder bundles it into Contents/Resources. resolveDaemonBin() finds the bundled copy first in a packaged build, the dev paths otherwise. Verified: the packaged app spawned its own bundled daemon on :8799, /health returned 200, and the window opened on it.
• Packaging. macOS .dmg + .zip, hardened runtime, build/entitlements.mac.plist, icon from scripts/macos/BigSmooth.icns. The nested daemon is signed separately (Identifier=smooth-daemon, flags=0x10000(runtime), team DTX9733844) and codesign --verify --deep --strict passes, so notarization has nothing to reject. pnpm notarize reuses scripts/macos/notarize-and-staple.sh. Windows NSIS + Authenticode wiring is stubbed and degrades to unsigned; untested.
• Tray. No more Terminal shell-out. Calendar/Reminders drive a new smooth-daemon tcc <what> as a one-shot child, Messages pokes Apple Events, Full Disk Access opens the pane and reveals the app. Result reported in a dialog.
• SMOOTH_MENUBAR decides in both directions (smooth-menubar). It could only turn the native status item on; the off direction is load-bearing the moment a daemon lives inside an app bundle that owns its own tray.

The blocker: TCC does not flow to a spawned child

This is the thing worth stopping on. Measured, not assumed:

Setup	Result
smooth-daemon tcc calendar spawned as a child of the signed Electron app, all four usage strings in its Info.plist	calendar: not-determined, no prompt
The identical binary, identical signature, as an app bundle's CFBundleExecutable launched via open	prompt appears correctly

I also tried moving the daemon to Contents/MacOS (so its main bundle resolves to the .app) — no change, and I reverted it. Being a bundled app's child is enough to use a grant; it is not enough to ask for one. Asking appears to need to be an app bundle's main executable launched through LaunchServices. Messages/Apple Events behaves the same way from a spawned osascript.

Two candidate fixes, neither in this PR because both change how the daemon is embedded:

1. Nested helper app — ship the daemon as Big Smooth Helper.app in Contents/Resources (which scripts/macos/make-app-bundle.sh already builds) and open it. Grants then attribute to the helper's bundle id, not the Electron app's — so the long-running server has to be launched the same way to use them, which changes daemon lifecycle management.
2. Native module — call EventKit from the Electron main process. Correct attribution, at the cost of a compiled native dependency.

Full write-up with the comparison table lives in desktop/README.md.

Also verified / not verified

cargo fmt, clippy, and cargo test (199 passing) clean on the two touched crates; pnpm test / tsc / oxfmt / oxlint clean. Windows and Linux have never been run. Notarization is wired but unexercised — only an Apple Distribution identity is on the build machine, and notarization needs Developer ID.

One gotcha found while testing: the web SPA is compiled into the daemon binary, so staging a daemon built without pnpm build:web gives a blank window. Noted in the README.

[brentrager]

Polish pass on the two things Brent hit:

Title bar / hamburger overlap — fixed. titleBarStyle: 'hiddenInset' floats the traffic lights over the page, and smooth-web puts its sidebar toggle in exactly that corner. Dropped it for a normal title bar: one deleted line, no CSS, and correct on Windows too. Verified against the real SPA (dev run against a live daemon) and in the packaged build — traffic lights now sit in the title bar, the hamburger clears them.

Going frameless properly would mean insetting smooth-web's own header, which lives in another crate and would move the browser PWA with it. Noted as the upgrade path in a ponytail: comment rather than done here.

Dock — was already correct in packaged builds and I confirmed rather than assumed: LSUIElement is not set, Contents/Resources/icon.icns is byte-identical to scripts/macos/BigSmooth.icns, and the running app appears in the Dock's tile list as "Big Smooth" with the th mark. What looked broken was pnpm dev, which runs out of Electron's own bundle and shows the stock atom icon — now app.dock.setIcon() on the unpackaged path so dev matches what ships.

Gates green (pnpm test, tsc, oxfmt, oxlint). Still review-hold; the TCC blocker from the previous comment is unchanged.