Let Your AI Assistant Use Your File Tools — Without Uploading Anything

You are three messages deep in a conversation with your coding assistant. It has just finished renaming a folder of exports, and the next thing you need is for those forty screenshots to be under 300 KB each before they go into the docs. So you stop, switch to another app, drag the folder in, pick a quality, press Run, wait, go back, and pick up the thread you dropped four minutes ago.

Or the assistant offers to do it for you — and then it shells out to ImageMagick with flags you did not choose, writes the results somewhere you did not pick, and the originals are quietly gone.

Neither of those is good. The first makes you the file clerk for your own assistant. The second hands a script full access to your disk and hopes for the best.

Your assistant can now use the tools you already trust

1FileTool exposes its tools to Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini over MCP. You say what you want in plain language, your assistant does it through 1FileTool, and every file stays on your Mac.

The phrase that routes a request here is deliberately blunt: "use 1filetool mcp to compress these images". Say that, and the work happens in the same engines, with the same output folder and the same history you get when you press Run yourself.

How it works in practice

One click connects every CLI on your machine

Open Settings → AI Access and flip the toggle. The badge next to it reads Listening once the server is up, and the line underneath tells you exactly where it is accepting requests: 127.0.0.1, loopback only, nothing exposed to your network.

Then press Reconnect. 1FileTool looks for Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI on your machine and writes the config entry for each one it finds — you can see which are wired up and which are missing at a glance. There is no JSON to hand-edit and no Node install to chase down; the server runs on the app's own binary. If you use a client the app does not know about, Set up another client manually gives you the snippet to paste.

Changed your mind? Remove unregisters it from every CLI, and the toggle stops the server outright.

64 jobs, addressed by name

Your assistant does not get a wall of 200 tool schemas dumped into its context. It gets a short list of tools and a registry it can query, which keeps the whole thing legible: 64 operations spanning PDF (20), image (12), video (9), audio (7), files (6), privacy (4), on-device AI (4), and automation (2).

That covers compressing and converting images, PDFs, video, and audio; splitting, merging, and OCR-ing PDFs; extracting text; stripping metadata; zipping and renaming — and running the workflow recipes you already saved.

That last one is the quiet win. Build a chain once — strip metadata, add a prefix, zip it — and afterwards "run my Privacy Upload Pack on this folder" is a single sentence.

Nothing gets destroyed behind your back

Operations that overwrite or delete your originals — Shred, Rename — refuse to run when an assistant asks. They come back asking for explicit confirmation first, so a misread instruction cannot cost you a file. Everything else writes to your normal output folder, where you can see it.

Inspecting a file is free: asking how big something is, what its dimensions are, how many pages it has, or how long it runs produces no output file and costs you nothing from your daily allowance.

The allowance you can see before you spend it

Work your assistant does counts toward the same 8 free files a day as work you do by hand, and it says so plainly when you have run out. What is new is that you can watch the number instead of discovering it.

The counter lives in the sidebar and ticks down as you work — and it updates the moment an assistant-driven job finishes, so the number is honest no matter who pressed Run. Every tool page repeats it in the run bar, right next to the button.

Getting to a tool got faster too

The tool list now filters as you type. Looking for Compress, Watermark, or Strip EXIF inside a category no longer means scrolling past everything else — start typing and the list narrows.

Each category also opens into sections named after the job you are doing — Reduce, Resize, Convert, Edit, Adjust, Protect — instead of one flat run of names.

And once your files are loaded, picking a different tool keeps them. Files, settings, and results all live on one page, so changing your mind from Resize to Resize (Pixels) no longer sends you back to an empty drop zone.

The run button stays docked at the bottom of the window with your file count and total size beside it. On a long tool page, it is always where you left it.

Before vs after

Getting a batch compressed while you work	Before	Now
Leaving your assistant mid-thread	Every time	Never
Choosing the tool	Find it in the sidebar, scroll the list	Say what you want
Where the files go	Wherever the shell command wrote them	Your normal output folder
Risk to your originals	A stray --in-place flag	Destructive jobs refuse without confirmation
What leaves your machine	Whatever a cloud tool uploads	Nothing — instructions only
Knowing your remaining free files	Discover it when Run fails	Counter in the sidebar and run bar

Who gets the most out of it

If you live in a terminal with an assistant open, this removes the last reason to leave it. Compressing the screenshots for a PR, OCR-ing a scanned contract, pulling the text out of a PDF — all of it happens in the same conversation.

If you handle files you cannot upload — client documents, medical scans, anything under NDA — you get assistant convenience without the usual trade. The assistant sends instructions; the bytes never move off your disk.

If you already built recipes, you just got a voice interface for them. The chains you assembled by hand are now things you can ask for by name.

Try it

Update to v1.9.0, open Settings → AI Access, flip it on, and press Reconnect. Restart your CLI so it picks up the new tools, then try the sentence that started all this: use 1filetool mcp to compress these images.

It stays off until you turn it on, and turning it off stops it immediately. In between, your assistant gets to do the file work — and you get to stay on the thing you were actually doing.