**quill** is a **fully local macOS meeting recorder and transcriber** that went from nothing to **3,795 stars and 252 forks** since the repository opened on **24 July 2026** — one of the sharpest three-week climbs on GitHub Trending this month. It is a **single Swift binary** with a menu-bar tray and no app bundle, sibling to the same author's `parrot`, and the entire pitch is in one line of the README: **nothing ever leaves the machine**. The recording model is the interesting design decision. One click captures **your microphone and all system audio as two separate tracks** — `mic.caf` and `system.caf`. This is done for two concrete reasons rather than tidiness: speech models perform better on clean single-source audio, and splitting mic from system output gives **free two-party diarization**, `me` versus `them`, with no speaker-identification model in the loop at all. The **CAF container** is likewise chosen on purpose — unlike m4a it needs no finalization pass, so if the process dies mid-meeting everything already written to disk remains readable. Transcription is built in, on-device, and automatic. The default engine is **Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2** (English) through **FluidAudio**'s Core ML port, which the author clocks at roughly **20 seconds per hour of audio on Apple Silicon**. The ~600 MB of models download once on first transcription, and `quill doctor` reports whether they are already cached — so you are never waiting on a download right after an important meeting. Each track is transcribed separately, shifted by its recorded start offset so both share a single clock, then merged by timestamp. Jobs run in a serial queue, meaning a new recording can start while the previous one is still transcribing, and **the filesystem is the queue**: a session directory holding `meta.json` but no `transcript.json` is pending, so unfinished jobs simply resume on next launch. Failures append to that session's `transcribe.log` and never block later jobs. Every session lands in `~/Recordings/<yyyy.MM.dd-HHmm>/` with both audio tracks, `meta.json` for timestamps and per-track offsets, a canonical `transcript.json` carrying engine provenance and timed speaker-tagged segments, a readable `transcript.md`, and the log. An optional `on_stop` hook in `~/.config/quill/config.json` spawns a shell command with the session directory as its argument once the transcript is written — the intended seam for summarization, filing, or indexing. System audio is captured through a **Core Audio process tap** via a private aggregate device, so there is **no virtual audio device and no kernel extension** to install. The constraints are narrow and worth stating. It is **macOS 15 or newer only** — the process-tap API requires it — with Apple Silicon recommended for transcription speed, so there is no Windows or Linux story whatsoever. The default engine is **English-only**; a WhisperKit large-v3-turbo fallback for re-transcription is described as planned, not shipped. A global tap records **everything** the Mac plays, notification dings and music included, which the README flags as a genuine gotcha. And with the newest commit dated **30 July 2026** against **23 open issues**, the repository has been quiet for about two weeks while attention has been at its peak.