Ambient Context

A macOS menu bar app that keeps a written record of what you work on, for your own LLM to read.

While the eye in your menu bar is open, Ambient Context reads the text of whichever window you have focused (via the macOS accessibility tree, every few seconds) and appends it to a plain markdown file: one file per day, in a folder you choose. Point Claude Code or any other agent at that folder and it can answer "what did I work on Tuesday?", build memory about your projects, or write your standup for you.

• No screenshots, no video. It reads text through the accessibility API, nothing else.
• Nothing leaves your machine. No account, no server, no telemetry, no bundled model. This build makes no network calls at all; the signed release will add a single update check against GitHub.
• Files you own. Plain markdown in a folder you chose. Move them, grep them, delete them.
• Redaction before writing. Password managers and private browsing windows are never captured. Password fields are skipped at the source, and credentials, API keys and card-shaped numbers are scrubbed before anything touches disk.
• Built to be read by an LLM. Lines are deduplicated across the day, interface junk is filtered out, and each block records the document path or URL it was looking at so your agent can open the real thing instead of trusting fragments. The folder carries an AGENTS.md explaining the format to whatever reads it.

Requires macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon.

Status

Early and unsigned. There is no notarised download yet (Apple Developer enrolment is in progress), so for now you build it yourself, which takes about two minutes:

Build and run

You need Node, Rust and Xcode Command Line Tools.

git clone https://github.com/dragthelake/ambient-context
cd ambient-context
npm install
npm run tauri build

The app lands in src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macos/. Drag Ambient Context.app to Applications and open it.

For development, npm run tauri dev runs it with hot reload.

First run

1. The settings window opens by itself. Grant Accessibility when asked: this is the permission that lets the app read window text, and nothing works without it.
2. Choose where to save. The default is ~/Ambient Context, deliberately outside ~/Documents so iCloud does not sync your record off the machine.
3. That's it. Recording starts once setup is complete and starts with the app from then on. Click the eye in the menu bar to stop; stopping is remembered until you start again.

Open eye: recording. Closed eye: not. Right-click the icon for today's file, the folder and settings.

What a day file looks like

---
date: 2026-08-25
captured_by: Ambient Context 0.1.0
---

## 09:41–10:05 · Chrome · Tauri tray documentation

url: https://v2.tauri.app/learn/system-tray/

<text seen in that window, first time it appeared today>

Block headings are the day's timeline. Body lines are written once per day no matter how often they are seen, so the file stays small enough to hand to an LLM whole. AGENTS.md in the capture folder documents the format and how to read it well.

Notes for testers

• Chromium and Electron apps (Chrome, Slack, VS Code, Obsidian, Figma...) only build their accessibility tree when asked, so the first seconds of capture in those apps are thin and fill in on later passes. Chrome may show a slightly glitchy window-resize animation while enabled; that is a known cost of the mechanism.
• GPU-rendered terminals (Kitty, Alacritty) expose little or no text. Terminal.app and iTerm2 work.
• Capture your findings: which apps come back rich, partial or empty is exactly the feedback that helps (docs/census.md has the template).

Tests

cd src-tauri && cargo test

Privacy model, in one paragraph

The app reads only the focused window: never background windows, other displays or minimised windows, and never while the screen is locked. It excludes password managers and private browsing entirely, skips secure input fields at the accessibility level, and pattern-scrubs secrets before writing. Everything it produces is plaintext on your own disk, and the capture folder is excluded from capture so it cannot observe itself. If you find a hole in any of this, please open an issue.