In memoriam
Actrok
“Grant GPT a hand.”
- Active
- December 2023 – February 2024
- Closed
- Lived at
- actrok.derekxwang.com
What it was
Actrok let ChatGPT work on your own computer. I liked what Open Interpreter could do, but I was already paying for ChatGPT Plus and didn’t want to pay again for API usage. So I built a bridge: requests from a GPT went through Actrok to an app on your Mac, and the results came back to the chat.
I launched it on February 3, 2024 as a free Open Interpreter for ChatGPT Plus users, with the macOS download handed out through Discord.
What I built
- Accounts with Google or GitHub sign-in, on Remix (upgraded to v2 a week before launch) and Tailwind.
- The web half of the desktop sign-in: the app opened a login attempt, you finished it in the browser, and the app polled until it was in.
- API keys and device linking, with 50 free requests per device, tracked in DynamoDB behind tRPC and an OpenAPI handler on Lambda.
- Actnel, the proxy underneath: wildcard subdomains of actnel.derekxwang.com pointed at a service on Fly.io, and every device, quota and licence in the backend belonged to it.
- Usage plans (trial, hobbyist, professional) in the data model. The code that would have switched them on stayed commented out.
How it ended
The site’s last commit landed a week before launch, in January 2024, and nothing here moved after that. I closed Actrok on 2026-10-07, together with the rest of the old SST v2 app.