If the name lencx sounds familiar, it's probably because of his last project — the ChatGPT desktop client, the open-source app that put ChatGPT on thousands of desktops.
His new project is Minke (637 stars, Apache-2.0): a local-first desktop agent workspace powered by DeepSeek Harness.
The problem it solves
The pain of working with a coding agent is fragmented context. Your conversation lives in one window, your project files in a file manager, your terminal in another, and your browser tabs scattered everywhere. When the agent is mid-task and you want to see which file it touched, you juggle windows.
Minke pulls it into one workspace: work with an agent across conversations, project files, terminals, and visible browser tabs. Take over a page when you need to, review and edit the files the agent produced, or reach your workspace from another device.
In short: your agent stops being a black-box chat and becomes a collaborator that shares your context, your files, and your screen.
Three signals it's worth watching
- Built by lencx — the ChatGPT-desktop author. He knows desktop apps, agent workflows, and what developers actually want; indie-polished tools are often more pleasant than big-company everything-apps.
- Local-first — workspace, files, and data stay on your machine, no cloud dependency. For privacy-minded and enterprise users, that's a requirement, not a feature.
- DeepSeek Harness underneath, but not locked to it — the project explicitly states it's "an independent community project, not an official DeepSeek product." You get an open, controllable workspace, not a shell tied to one model vendor.
The honest caveat
It's under active development — 637 stars, 69 forks, and the README warns that features, packaging, and local data schema may change. Don't expect a stable production tool today. It's also an Electron desktop app, and despite the "DeepSeek Harness" in the title, it's lencx's independent project — you run DeepSeek Harness locally or bring your own model.
I've localized the README and core docs to Chinese: https://github.com/yangshun2005/Minke-cn
If you find this project useful, a star on the original repo supports the author's ongoing maintenance.
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