useful idea if your day disappears into ten windows and an evening prompt turns into archaeology. the tradeoff is obvious: you are making a sensitive local diary, so the value depends on being picky about rules and what folder gets to keep it.
Ambient Context
A macOS menu bar app that keeps a written record of what you worked on.
4 ratings4.23
Saves62
CategoryProductivity
PlatformWeb
PricingFree
Ambient Context is a free, open source macOS menu bar app for Apple Silicon (macOS 14+). It captures text from the focused app window regularly, saving a daily markdown record of your work context. It integrates with agent CLI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Codex) to generate knowledge bases and daily summaries from these records, enhancing AI assistant context without sending data externally. Privacy-focused with local storage and user-controlled data capture rules.
time-trackingmarkdownopen-source
Ratings & Reviews
Write a reviewInformation
CategoryProductivity
PlatformsWeb
PricingFree
AccountNot confirmed
ListedAugust 2026
WebVisit
Report a problem
Around the Web
Show HN62 source points · 27 comments
I experimented with this exact same approach earlier this year. It's barely sufficient, because, bluntly, most apps just aren't wired up right. So you end up having to hand code a lot of specific profiles for specific apps to make this work well, and even then, you don't quite get the right level of detail to make it work out. Will try this app, to see if it improved on my own approach, but man, the hope levels are low.
etchalon · Imported from Show HN
One app that's using this technique (not exactly sure if it's the same) is Littlebird: https://littlebird.ai/ I also saw that HeyClicky started doing something similar but end up removing from the product.
Dramatize · Imported from Show HN
> reads the text of your focused window every few seconds through the Accessibility API > It writes plain markdown Where are the formatting decisions coming from?
zahlman · Imported from Show HN
Hmm. What would be really helpful for me would be an enhancement of the TypeWhisper app for dictation that would be able to get the context of what I am dictating into and send it along with the prompt to an LLM. Probably much simpler and much less of a privacy problem (I run my own local LLM for that purpose so that nothing leaves the machine).
jwr · Imported from Show HN
Nice constraint. I've been building in this space for a while now and the lossiness question is a real one. The accessibility tree works for a lot of things but the more I worked on it the more stuff I found needed pixels. YMMV.
jv22222 · Imported from Show HN