appshots

Appshots is a small macOS app that sits in the menu bar and helps AI coding assistants understand what is happening on your screen. When you trigger it (by pressing left Option and right Option at the same time, or by clicking its menu bar icon), it captures a screenshot of whatever app window is in front. It also reads the accessibility state of that window, which is structured text describing the interface elements the app is showing, similar to what a screen reader would describe to a visually impaired user.

The tool bundles the screenshot and the accessibility description into a reference block and places it in your clipboard, formatted as an app-shots tag. You paste this into your conversation with an AI coding agent such as Claude Code, and the agent can use both the visual screenshot and the text description to understand what you are looking at.

The project was inspired by a similar feature in OpenAI's Codex product, and it exists to bring that kind of dual context to Claude Code and other AI agents running on macOS. Without something like this, an AI agent responding to a question about your app's interface has no way to see what you are actually seeing.

The app is written in Swift and is a native macOS application. The README is brief and does not cover installation steps in detail.