Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

Hey HN, I built Yoink AI to solve my biggest frustration with AI tools: they constantly break my workflow. I was tired of copy-pasting between my apps and a chatbot just for simple edits.

Yoink AI is a macOS app that brings the AI to you. With a simple hotkey (⌘ Shift Y), it works directly inside any text field, in any app. If you can type there Yoink can write there

Key Features: - Automatically captures the context of the text field you're in, so you dont have to manually prime it

- Create custom voices trained on your own writing samples. This helps you steer the output to match your personal style and avoid generic, robotic-sounding text

- Yoink doesnt just dump text and run. It delivers suggestions as redline edits that you can accept or reject, keeping you in full control.

It's less of a chatbot and more of a collaborative writing partner that adapts to your workflow, not the other way around.

There's a free tier with 10 requests/month and we just launched a pro trial, which will get you 100 requests for the first 7 days to try it out!

I'm here to answer questions and would love to hear what you think - like all early stage start ups, feedback is always deeply appreciated

Comments (4)

Wowfunhappy · 1h ago

How are you able to do this with all of Apple's restrictions? I know there's the accessibility API, but since Mojave the user needs to manually grant permission to do control each individual target app, is that what they need to do for Yoink?

jasonjmcghee · 49m ago

Can't speak to Yoink but I built a project a year or two ago that did something similar. I used a stupid simple method - input simulation (using the fantastic enigo library). And if you want context, you can simulate select all + copy, and access via clipboard. Similar if you want to replace, etc.

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/plock

The goal of this project was to just be able to pipe / run arbitrary commands from any text context. But, that lined up well with LLMs usage.

CameronBanga · 1h ago

Just as a first initial thought, when I think of Yoink for Mac, I think of this popular tool: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yoink-better-drag-and-drop/id4...

At first I thought Yoink was making a new AI tool, not that this was a brand new thing.

byintes · 7h ago

Hey everyone, founder of Yoink here. Thanks for checking out the post! I'm really excited to hear what you think, and I'm genuinely open to all feedback the good, the bad, and the ugly.

We're really early, and all feedback is always deeply appreciated as many of you would know!

Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

My startup banking story (2023) (mitchellh.com)

Some thoughts on LLMs and software development (martinfowler.com)

Uncertain<T> (nshipster.com)

Fuck up my site – Turn any website into beautiful chaos (fuckupmysite.com)

Building your own CLI coding agent with Pydantic-AI (martinfowler.com)

In Search of AI Psychosis (astralcodexten.com)

Launch HN: Dedalus Labs (YC S25) – Vercel for Agents

Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference? (martinalderson.com)

There Goes the American Muscle Car (thedispatch.com)

VLT observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS II (arxiv.org)

A forgotten medieval fruit with a vulgar name (2021) (bbc.com)

AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study (cnbc.com)

RFC 8594: The Sunset HTTP Header Field (2019) (datatracker.ietf.org)

Optimising for maintainability – Gleam in production at Strand (gleam.run)

Spiped – secure pipe for SSH, SMTP, etc. (tarsnap.com)

Show HN: SwiftAI – open-source library to easily build LLM features on iOS/macOS (github.com)

Will AI Replace Human Thinking? The Case for Writing and Coding Manually (ssp.sh)

Performance Speed Limits (2019) (travisdowns.github.io)

Microbial metabolite repairs liver injury by restoring hepatic lipid metabolism (journals.asm.org)

Web Bot Auth (developers.cloudflare.com)

Charting Form Ds to roughly see the state of venture capital “fund” raising (tj401.com)

GPU Prefix Sums: A nearly complete collection (github.com)

That boolean should probably be something else (ntietz.com)

Prosper AI (YC S23) Is Hiring Founding Account Executives (NYC) (jobs.ashbyhq.com)

Group Borrowing: Zero-cost memory safety with fewer restrictions (verdagon.dev)

The Lobster Programming Language (strlen.com)

Important machine learning equations (chizkidd.github.io)

The sisters “paradox” – counter-intuitive probability (blog.engora.com)

Claude Code Checkpoints (claude-checkpoints.com)

Rendering a game in real time with AI (blog.jeffschomay.com)

Open Source is one person (opensourcesecurity.io)

The Unforgotten (espn.com)

Service members deserve the right to repair (militarytimes.com)

Buypass discontinues issuance of TLS/SSL certificates (buypass.com)

Das Problem mit German Strings (polarsignals.com)

Teams Grow Organically (frederickvanbrabant.com)

Mosh Mobile Shell (mosh.org)

China is eating the world (apropos.substack.com)

How to install TrueNAS on a Raspberry Pi (jeffgeerling.com)

Citrix forgot to tell you CVE-2025–6543 has been used as a zero day since May (doublepulsar.com)

Seeing infrared: contact lenses that grant 'super-vision' (theguardian.com)

Show HN: Yoink AI – macOS AI app that edits directly in any textfield of any app (useyoink.ai)

Show HN: Grammit – Local-only AI grammar checker (Chrome extension) (chromewebstore.google.com)

You no longer need JavaScript: an overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome (lyra.horse)

PinePhone Pro [GNU/Linux smartphone] has been discontinued (social.treehouse.systems)

Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough (2023) (xeiaso.net)

iOS Elegantbouncer: When you can't get samples but still need to catch threats (msuiche.com)

Lenin Was a Mushroom (en.wikipedia.org)

The Math Behind GANs (2020) (jaketae.github.io)

Show HN: Yoink AI – macOS AI app that edits directly in any textfield of any app

Comments (4)