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eyhn/appshots

★ 16SwiftAudience · developerComplexity · 1/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A macOS menu bar app that captures a screenshot and the text accessibility description of any window, then copies both to your clipboard so you can paste them into an AI coding assistant like Claude Code.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((appshots))
    What it does
      Captures screenshot
      Reads accessibility tree
      Copies to clipboard
    How to trigger
      Both Option keys
      Menu bar icon
    Output format
      app-shots tag
      Screenshot plus text
    Use with
      Claude Code
      Other AI agents
    Tech
      Swift
      macOS native
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Code map

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Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Press both Option keys to snapshot your app's current screen and paste the result into Claude Code so it can see what you're debugging.

USE CASE 2

Share the accessibility tree of a UI bug with an AI assistant so it understands the interface structure without needing full source code.

Tech stack

SwiftmacOS

Getting it running

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 5min

In plain English

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.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
I've pasted an app-shots block from Appshots into this conversation. Based on the screenshot and accessibility description, what might be causing the misaligned button I see?
Prompt 2
Here is the app-shots output from a macOS settings panel. Help me write Swift code that matches this exact layout.
Prompt 3
I'm building a macOS tool similar to Appshots. Write the Swift code to capture the accessibility tree of the frontmost window as a string.
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