Live session · SILT · 30-second excerpt at 2× · 1.4 MB

Your desktop, zoomed out into the agent's instrument.

A macOS overlay for pi. One chord and the screen you're looking at shrinks into a CRT beside a live agent transcript — with the last few minutes of it on tape.

⌥Space: reveal / hide
⌥ + scroll ↓: scrub the zoom
⌥ + scroll ←→: rewind time
⌥Tab: agent ⇄ desktop

It sees

The revealed harness: the live desktop embedded in a CRT on the left, the pi transcript on the right, and the agent action tape running beneath the screen

Live ScreenCaptureKit stream of every display, always on, delivered only when pixels change.
A ring buffer of the last minutes at 1 fps plus permanent 5-minute checkpoints, each described by a vision model — so “when was I last in Xcode?” is a text search.
The agent gets desktop_screenshot, desktop_windows, desktop_history, and an accessibility tree with stable ids — it reads controls before it clicks pixels.

It drives

Porthole mode: the embed is zoomed into a single window, aspect-fitted, streamed on its own — Porthole — `⌥`+scroll ↑ over a window zooms into just that window; tools then take window-local coordinates.

desktop_accessibility — snapshot, press, focus, enter_text, move_mouse by element id. Secure fields are redacted.
desktop_mouse / desktop_key for everything AX can't describe: canvases, drags, scrolls.
desktop_window and desktop_space — focus or zoom a window, switch Spaces on exactly one display. Nothing the agent holds can toggle the overlay itself.
Click into the embed and the real pointer becomes the desktop's until ⌥Tab — confined to that display, no side-of-screen drags.
Every action lands on the tape under the screen and charges the phosphor. Typing ticks. Chimes share one root note.

It rewinds

Timeline scrub: the embed shows a frame from eight seconds ago with VHS colour bleed, the nameplate reads −8s — `⌥`+scroll sideways, or `⌃⌥⌘←`/`→`, drags the tape. The agent can `seek`, `step`, `find`, `note` — and the moment it acts, the view snaps back to live first.

Install

# from a release zip
curl -LO https://github.com/harryaskham/panopticon/releases/latest/download/Panopticon-0.1.0.zip
ditto -x -k Panopticon-0.1.0.zip ~/Applications/
open ~/Applications/Panopticon.app

# or from source (host Xcode + nix)
git clone https://github.com/harryaskham/panopticon && cd panopticon
nix develop -c scripts/build.sh install

macOS 14+, Apple silicon. First launch asks for Screen Recording; desktop control needs Accessibility and Input Monitoring. Release downloads currently require GitHub repository access.

Make any pi a Panopticon pi

pi install git:github.com/harryaskham/panopticon

The desktop_* tools and desktop-context pushes, talking to the running app over its control socket. Also an HTTP MCP endpoint for other agents on the machine.

Config lives at ~/.config/panopticon/config.yaml; /settings in the harness edits it live. Everything is scriptable through panopticonctl.