Quick recap
Today I needed to control my Mac Mini from my laptop. The Mac Mini is in another room and is acting as my build machine, but the particular app I wanted to access isn’t deployed to a server in the cloud yet. I wanted to access it remotely over the local network.
I hadn’t used VNC or macOS screen sharing in a while, so I asked ChatGPT Desktop how to get this working. It guided me clearly through enabling Screen Sharing and Remote Management via System Settings → General → Sharing. I restricted access to just my user account.
Next, I asked ChatGPT how to connect from my laptop. It told me to open Finder and use:
vnc://192.168.XXX.XXX
That worked — I was able to see and control the Mac Mini. When I closed the VNC window, the Mac Mini resumed local control of the screen.
I also asked ChatGPT if it could enable screen sharing directly, and confirmed that it cannot run commands or control system settings — which is a good security behavior. But it could see the commands I typed in the terminal and help me interpret the output (like identifying my IP address from ifconfig).
Overall, this was a quick and smooth setup. ChatGPT helped me avoid searching docs and just let me ask questions naturally as I worked through the setup.
This post was written in part by ChatGPT with human review.
