// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Show HN: Screen memory without screenshots, just text to Markdown
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.
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:
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.
Open eye: recording. Closed eye: not. Right-click the icon for today's
file, the folder and settings.
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.
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.