Allihat: Good App, Hard Sell

Reviewing software has become a minefield. Post something positive and somebody decides you must be the developer in disguise. Review a paid app and a crowd shows up to litigate every penny; make it a subscription and they bring reinforcements. Privacy-focused readers want to know where every byte goes, and given the state of surveillance capitalism, that's fair. Then there's the elephant in the room: AI. Half the internet bristles at it for reasons that are at least partly justified, while the other half has quietly used it to do things that would have been difficult to impossible without it. None of that changes what a review is for: what the app does, who it helps, and what I learned from actually testing it. So here goes. AlliHat AlliHat is a Safari extension by Nathan Kontny that puts an AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Apple's on-device model — in the Safari sidebar (App Store). Free download, $29.99/year IAP, macOS 14 or later. Features BYOK. Bring your own key from…