How-to guides

Working with Mochi

The companion on your desktop, what it can watch for you, and the files that wait for your approval.

Mochi is OOMU outside the window. It is a small round character that sits on your desktop, above whatever you are doing, so you can ask a question without switching apps. If you want it to, it also keeps an eye on the things you choose, prepares a short summary when something comes in, and lets you know.

Mochi can prepare work on its own. It cannot approve its own work. Anything it makes while you are not watching waits for you in Ready for review, and nothing reaches your folders until you say so.

Showing, hiding, and moving Mochi

Mochi appears when OOMU starts. Drag it anywhere on your screen and it stays there, including the next time OOMU opens.

To	Do this
Show or hide Mochi	⌘⇧M, or Show / Hide Mochi in the raven menu in your menu bar
Open the main OOMU window	⌘⇧O, or Open Workstation
Put it away for now	Right-click Mochi and choose Dismiss to Menu Bar
Move it out of the way	Right-click and choose Dock to Bottom Right
Quiet it for a while	Right-click and choose Sleep for 1 Hour. It comes back by itself.

Mochi's face tells you what it is doing. It looks up while it thinks, hops when something needs you, grins when a task finishes, and looks disappointed when one cannot be completed. Its eyes follow your pointer when it comes close. If Reduce motion is on in macOS, Mochi keeps still.

Asking Mochi a question

Click Mochi and type in Ask Mochi…. The answer appears in a balloon above it as it is written. The top of the balloon shows which model answered, and a short status line tells you when it is doing something slower, such as "Searching the web...".

Ask a follow-up... at the bottom of the balloon continues the same conversation.
Open Workstation ↗ opens that conversation in the main window, so you can carry on with the full workspace. It is an ordinary OOMU chat: the same routing, the same history, the same rules about what needs your approval.
Esc closes the balloon. Mochi stays where it is.

Ask about the weather in a US city or ZIP code and Mochi shows a forecast card, with the current temperature, the high and low, and when rain is likely. The forecast comes from the US National Weather Service, so weather is not available for places outside the United States.

Choosing what Mochi watches

Under Mochi there is a small status line, such as "Downloads 8m ago • Standing by". Click it to open Standing interests: "Choose what Mochi watches. Document previews stay on this Mac."

Every interest is off until you turn it on. Once one is on, Mochi checks about every 15 minutes and when your Mac wakes, and a new file in Downloads is noticed as soon as it arrives. When a check finds something worth your attention, Mochi hops and opens a card.

Interest	What Mochi does	Card actions
Downloads	Reads a new PDF, Word, Excel, CSV, text, or Markdown file of up to 16 MB on this Mac and writes a two-sentence preview.	Review & Open, Approve, Snooze 2 Hours
Weather shifts	Watches the US city or ZIP code you save, and tells you when rain is likely or freezing temperatures are expected within the next hour.	Review & Open, Approve, Snooze 2 Hours
Upcoming events	Tells you about an event on your calendar that starts within the next 30 minutes.	Review & Open, Approve, Snooze 2 Hours
Inbox Triage	Reads your unread mail, in your inboxes or one folder you name, and flags messages with a real deadline, a legal or regulatory issue, a critical problem, or an important sender. Newsletters, promotions, and routine notifications are left alone. Each card has a two-sentence summary.	Draft Reply, Mark Read, Open in Mail
Meeting Briefing	Thirty minutes before a meeting, shows its title, time, and agenda from the event itself. It never invents attendees.	Join Call (when the event has a meeting link), View Notes, Snooze 10m
Commitments & Priorities	Finds explicit tasks addressed to you, and promises you made, in the mail it reads. Each one is quoted word for word and added to an OOMU Commitments list in Reminders. The card summarizes what is still open.	Open Reminders
Topic Radar	Follows up to five topics. Each topic needs a public news feed address (RSS or Atom, starting with `https://`). Mochi only interrupts you for a major development, not every new article.	Read Source ↗, Draft Brief

Every card can also be closed without acting on it. A few things worth knowing:

Four interests need the larger local model. Inbox Triage, Meeting Briefing, Commitments & Priorities, and Topic Radar read with Gemma 4 E4B, which OOMU sets up on Macs with more than 8 GB of memory. On an 8 GB Mac they stay unavailable rather than fall back to a smaller model or a cloud one. Downloads, Weather shifts, and Upcoming events work on every Mac.
Summaries wait for power. Those four also hold their summaries until your Mac is plugged in, or above 60% battery at a normal temperature, then catch up.
Draft Reply never sends. It creates an unsent draft in Mail, and the card stays until you deal with the message.
Commitments is the one interest that writes on its own, and only to its own Reminders list. That is what turning it on means. Turn it off and nothing more is added.
Snooze quiets the whole interest, not just the one card: two hours for most, ten minutes for a meeting.
Check now at the bottom of the panel runs every enabled interest immediately. Recent checks lists the last results with their times.

The analysis happens on this Mac, with your local model, and only that model: what Mochi reads on its own is never sent to a cloud model, even if you use one for chat. Some interests need to reach the network to do their job: weather asks the National Weather Service, Topic Radar fetches the feeds you list, and Gmail or Google Calendar are used only if you choose them below. See Privacy & security.

Mail and calendar from Google

Open Providers & background monitoring in the same panel to choose where Mochi reads from:

Area	Choices
Email	Apple Mail, or Gmail
Calendar	Apple Calendar, or Google Calendar
Tasks	Apple Reminders

The Google choices appear once you have connected Google Workspace in Connections. They disappear while Air-Gap Mode is on, and Mochi goes back to the Apple app and says so, rather than switching quietly.

Keeping watch while OOMU is closed

By default Mochi only checks while OOMU is open. To keep your interests running after you quit, open Providers & background monitoring and choose Enable background monitoring. OOMU asks first:

"Allow Mochi to monitor your enabled interests while OOMU is closed and start automatically when you sign in? Analysis stays on this Mac."

Choose Allow background monitoring and OOMU installs a small background service that starts when you sign in. Disable background monitoring asks again, then removes the service.

The background service watches your battery and your Mac's temperature:

When	What happens
On power, or battery above 60%	Normal checks.
Battery at 60% or below, or the Mac is running hot	"Saving power. Classification continues; summaries wait for more power."
Battery at 10% or below, the Mac is very hot, or asleep	"Monitoring paused while power or temperature is critical."

If the service stops, the status line under Mochi says "Background service offline · Open OOMU to keep monitoring", so you never assume it is watching when it is not.

Two things the background service does not do. It does not listen to Slack or Discord: those only answer while OOMU itself is open. And it is not the same switch as Continue scheduled work in Settings → General → Startup, which keeps scheduled workflows running.

Ready for review

When OOMU makes a file while you are not watching, it does not put it in your folders. It puts it in Ready for review, in the Standing interests panel: "Files stay on this Mac until you approve saving them."

Two things land there today:

Files from scheduled workflows. A scheduled run that writes a text file, a Word document, or an Excel workbook leaves it here, along with the folder it was meant for.
An activity brief, if you ask for one. Prepare activity brief writes a short Markdown summary of Mochi's recent checks. It is a safe way to see the whole flow once.

For each file:

Action	What it does
Review	Shows the contents, then asks "Approve and save to:" Documents, Desktop, or Choose folder…
Snooze	Keeps it waiting without reminding you, for one hour
Dismiss	Saves nothing. Remove dismissed files clears dismissed files out of the holding area.

Saving is careful in three ways. OOMU never replaces a file that already has the same name. It moves the file in one step rather than copying it piece by piece, which means the destination has to be on the same disk. And after the move it checks the saved file against the fingerprint taken when the file was made. If any of that fails, the item stays in Ready for review with "This save needs review."

Every decision is recorded. Chat → Activity shows the Approval history: what was prepared, reviewed, saved, dismissed, or snoozed, when, and whether the decision came from your Mac or from Slack or Discord. The history can only be added to. Nothing in OOMU can edit or delete it.

Limits. Up to 500 files and 512 MB wait at once, and a single file can be up to 32 MB. A file that would go over is refused and recorded, not quietly dropped.