Free Mac app answers AI questions, then burns the chat away

A new Mac app called Howler lets you ask an AI a quick question, read the answer, then make the whole chat vanish. Press Option+H and a parchment letter with a wax seal appears on your screen. Press Escape and the letter burns, leaving no chat history on your computer.

What it does

Howler is open source and comes from a developer who goes by Aries Zhou. The name is borrowed from Harry Potter, where a Howler is a letter that yells and then bursts into flames. Answers are written out slowly, first in glowing gold that settles into sepia print. The wax seal shows a letter for the model you chose. Zhou said he wanted to look things up or translate without opening a browser or a separate chat session.

How it handles privacy

Howler's website describes several limits on what the app keeps:

• Messages are held only in memory, with no history saved.
• Requests go straight to the AI service you pick, never through a relay.
• The app keeps no logs.
• It connects elsewhere only to check for updates, and that can be turned off.
• Your API key, a code that lets the app talk to an AI service, is stored in the macOS Keychain and never enters the chat.

The catch

Setup is not simple. You either paste a setup prompt into a coding agent, such as Claude Code, or type the configuration commands yourself. Pasting the prompt is the recommended route. After that, Howler can connect to supported AI models with an API key, or to compatible models running on your own machine.

Privacy has a limit too. Howler clears the chat from your Mac, but the AI company behind the model may still keep a record of what you asked. It is not a way to hide questions from the provider.

What is not known

The article does not say which models are supported or which Macs can run the app. It also gives no release date. Howler can be downloaded from its website or from GitHub.