Show HN: Promptive – A native macOS utility for system-wide AI actions

I built a tool to solve my biggest LLM workflow frustration: context switching.

The idea came from trying to meta-prompt in Cursor, I found myself constantly jumping to a browser or dedicated AI app just to improve a prompt. This copy/paste/tweak cycle was a huge productivity killer. I wanted AI to integrate seamlessly into my workflow, not disrupt it.

That's why I built Promptive. It's a native macOS app that lets you select any text, in any application, and run a custom LLM prompt on it with a global keyboard shortcut or right-click and select the action in the context-menu.

How it works:

Select Text: Highlight anything on your Mac (code, a foreign language comment, a dense paragraph).

Trigger Action: Hit a global hotkey or right-click to bring up the context menu.

Apply Prompt: Choose from your library of built-in or custom prompts.

Get Results: The output can either replace the selected text directly, copy the result to clipboard or or appear in an overlay.

The goal is to make using LLMs as fast as copy-and-paste. I can now store specialized prompts for things like "Improve This Cursor Prompt", "Explain this," "Make this more concise," or "Convert this to a formal email" and apply them instantly, from anywhere.

I designed Promptive around two privacy-focused models:

Privacy & Bring Your Own Key (BYOK): This is the default. You use your own API keys from OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic. Keys are stored securely in the macOS Keychain, and all API calls are made directly from your Mac to the provider. My servers never see your prompts or data.

Simplicity & Credits: If you prefer not to manage keys, there's a credit system that uses OpenRouter on the backend. In this mode, requests are proxied for billing, but we do not log or store user inputs & prompts.

The site is: https://www.promptiveai.app

Thanks for reading - would love to hear any feedback!