Orchard for macOS — AI Client Setup Guide

Every morning starts with the same slog: scan a crowded inbox, shuffle a meeting that no longer fits, fire off a reminder before you forget it. Orchard turns each of those into a sentence for your AI assistant — ask it to screen your inbox and summarize what needs attention, move tomorrow’s meeting to 2pm, or remind you to call the dentist — and it carries out the request in the real Mail, Calendar, or Reminders app on your Mac. It bridges AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to 11 native Apple apps through 52 tools, so these daily chores stop costing you clicks and context switches.

If you need a macOS AI client that can act in Apple apps rather than merely chat about them, Orchard connects your assistant locally through Agent Skills, the orchard CLI, or MCP.

What Orchard is

Orchard is a menu bar app: no Dock icon, no separate settings window. Click the icon to open a compact panel where you sign in, enable apps, and check permissions. Everything else happens through your AI client: ask it something in natural language, and it calls Orchard’s tools to carry out the request in the real app.

Orchard connects to your AI client through one of three channels:

• Skill — an Agent Skill package for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, and other clients that support the Agent Skills format. This is the recommended channel: it ships richer usage guidance alongside the tools.
• CLI — the orchard command line tool, useful for scripting and for verifying that a tool call works before wiring up a client.
• MCP — a standard Model Context Protocol (MCP) connector (orchard mcp) for any client that speaks the MCP standard, including Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible clients. It runs locally as part of the Orchard CLI.

All three channels connect to the same running Orchard.app on your Mac. There’s no HTTP server and no open network port; everything stays on your Mac.

How it works

flowchart LR
    A[Your AI assistant] --> B[Orchard]
    B --> C[Apple apps]

Orchard.app does the actual work: it holds every macOS permission (Reminders, Calendars, Full Disk Access, Automation, and so on) and carries out each request in the real app. None of the three channels hold permissions themselves, so Orchard must be running for any of them to work. See Privacy Architecture for the full picture.

Apps and tools

Orchard integrates with 11 Apple apps through 52 tools. Reminders, Calendar, and Clock are free with no usage limits. The remaining 8 apps require Orchard Pro.

See Free vs Pro for the full plan comparison.

Connect your AI client

Choose the guide for the assistant you already use:

Next steps

• New to Orchard? Start with Installation.
• Ready to try it? Follow the Quick Start walkthrough.
• Not sure which connection method to use? Read the CLI reference or start with the Agent Skill guide for your client above.