thesophiaxu

thesophiaxu / contextd

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An efficient macOS app that continuously captures your screen activity, summarizes it with an LLM, and makes it available for other local tools.

32
4
100% credibility
Found Mar 20, 2026 at 32 stars -- GitGems finds repos before they trend. Get early access to the next one.
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AI Analysis
Swift
AI Summary

ContextD is a macOS menu bar app that captures text changes from your screen, summarizes your activity locally, and enriches AI prompts with recent context via a hotkey or simple web search.

How It Works

1
🔍 Discover ContextD

You hear about a handy Mac app that remembers what you've been doing on your screen to make your AI chats smarter.

2
📥 Get and start the app

Download the app bundle and open it on your Mac—it shows up quietly in your menu bar.

3
✅ Allow screen access

The app asks for permission to see your screen and window titles, like allowing a helpful assistant to watch over your shoulder safely.

4
🔗 Connect a smart helper

Enter a simple passcode from an AI service so it can summarize what you see on screen.

5
👁️ It starts remembering

The eye icon in your menu bar lights up, quietly noting changes on your screen every few seconds without storing pictures.

6
Make your prompts smarter
💬
Quick enrich

Type a question, pick a time window, and get back a supercharged prompt with footnotes from your recent work.

🌐
Explore your history

Visit the built-in web page to search summaries or browse your activity timeline.

🎉 AI knows your context

Your AI assistants now understand your recent coding, reading, or tasks automatically—saving time and frustration!

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AI-Generated Review

What is contextd?

ContextD is a macOS app in Swift that runs in your menu bar, capturing screen activity every 2 seconds via efficient pixel diffs and selective OCR on changes only. It summarizes your work with a cheap LLM like Claude Haiku (~$2/day via OpenRouter), storing everything in a local contextdb accessible via HTTP API at localhost:21890. Use it to feed context-dependent details—like recent code edits or terminal output—directly into your AI tools without manual copying.

Why is it gaining traction?

Unlike screenshot-heavy screen recorders, it skips unchanged areas with SIMD-accelerated diffs, forcing full keyframes only on big shifts or app switches, keeping costs low and storage lean. The killer hook: hotkey Cmd+Shift+Space enriches any prompt with timestamped footnotes from your activity, plus API endpoints for search, summaries, and citations that any local tool can query. Devs love the interactive docs at /docs and configurable models/limits in settings.

Who should use this?

MacOS power users building context-aware AI agents or coding assistants that need real-time screen context, like debugging sessions in VS Code or Terminal commands. Frontend/backend devs tired of re-explaining recent changes to chatbots, or anyone integrating local LLMs with personal activity logs via the FTS-powered search API.

Verdict

Grab it if you're on Sonoma+ and want a lightweight context diagram of your workflow—solid Makefile, benchmarks, and OpenAPI spec make hacking easy. At 32 stars and 1.0% credibility, it's early-stage but production-ready for tinkerers; watch for on-device LLM swaps to kill the API key dependency. (198 words)

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