Launch HN: Screenpipe (YC S26) – Record how you work and turn that into agents
Hi Hacker News, I'm Louis. I built Screenpipe (https://screenpipe.com), an app that records your screen and audio locally (only!), and gives AI agents a searchable memory of what you've seen, said, and heard. This makes it easier to automate your repetitive tasks, turn them into SOPs (Standard Operating Procedure) and so on.
I made a HN-style demo video at https://www.tella.tv/video/build-your-ai-second-brain-with-s... and there’s a marketing video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1jV6E9pyug.
I’ve been obsessed with this for a long time. I’ve been maintaining a “second brain” since 2020, in which I would store journals, handwritten notes, music I listen to, projects I'm working on, conversations I have with people, personal CRM etc. I experimented a lot of RAG in the early days with ParlAI, hundreds of fine-tuned GPT2 models, and GPT3 (https://forum.obsidian.md/t/fine-tuning-openai-api-gpt3-on-y...). Later I built Ava, the first Obsidian AI plugin, which grew to a few thousands of users quickly. It then became Embedbase, an API to make it easier to build AI apps powered by RAG.
What I learned from all this is how important it is for the models to have context about what you’re doing on your computer, in order to get them to do what you want.
In the early days there was fine tuning but it was too much pain, then there was tool calling so that AI can access software you use but still kinda not autonomous enough. needing micro management. Then MCP came, but it felt too static, and non technical users struggled to build and use MCP. Then we got skills. Most recently we’ve seen Karpethy’s LLM-maintained wiki, Garry's GBrain, etc., where an agent incrementally maintains a persistent collection of Markdown pages. New sources update entity pages, strengthen or contradict existing claims, and improve a synthesis that compounds over time. I like this pattern, but it still begins with someone selecting and importing the sources. There is still no way AI can know what you and your company are doing every day, across apps, not just inside of apps.
Of course, not everyone wants this. But I do! I want AI to know what I'm doing and never lose memory ever again, and I want it to use the same software that humans do, without painful context switches.
I started building Screenpipe for myself in 2024 - a CLI to record your screen and plug this context into AI. An HN user posted it in 2024 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695840) and that discussion influenced the product. The most useful criticism concerned recording consent, local security, CPU usage, signal-to-noise, and whether agents could act on top of the data.
The naive implementation started from continuously recording video and running OCR over every frame. But that creates duplicate data, consumes substantial resources (it basically turns your computer into a space heater!), and discards structure the operating system already knows. Screenpipe now instead listens for events such as app switches, clicks, typing pauses, scrolling, and idle fallbacks. When something meaningful changes, it pairs a screenshot with the operating system’s accessibility tree at the same timestamp. OCR is used when structured accessibility data is unavailable. We also capture audio continuously, identify speakers and transcribe locally through Parakeet/Whisper or using cloud models.
Everything is indexed in a local SQLite database, mp4 files, and sometimes md files. An AI friendly API on port 3030 is open for agents, with authentication and a MCP and skills.
Once Screenpipe has been up and running for a while, you can use it through our built-in chat, Claude, ChatGPT, Hermes, Openclaw, or any agent, to do things like:
- adding context to your current chat, e.g. "gather all context about task X", then requiring less prompts to achieve your goal
- retrieve information, e.g. "retrieve the tasks i was working on from 8 am to 4 pm, make a list of what got done and what's left"
- create and maintain a personal wiki / second brain for your agents: "every 1h organize everything i do in projects, people, tasks, meetings in my Obsidian vault as markdown files and folders"
- create automations: whenever i visit someone's profile on linkedin, update my crm
- find automation opportunities: look at everything my team has done this week and turn it into a list of automation opportunities
Screenpipe data is stored locally, though we also offer an enterprise plan to discover automation opportunities and for that the company decides where the data lives. We built our own AI PII model to redact sensitive information, it runs locally on Apple MLX or Windows DirectML, we also support cloud confidential inference for low end devices, although our local models are meant to use <1% CPU and <400 mb RAM. Users can set apps, windows, and urls to filter, in addition to browser incognito mode.
We also support recording schedules and other privacy features.
Most of our codebase is written in Rust, MLX, Onnx, we like cidre or direct C call for Apple APIs and windows-rs for Windows API. We also experimentally support Linux.
We have a desktop app (https://screenpipe.com/how-to-install) and a CLI:
npx screenpipe record
You can run that without creating an account. All the code is source-available at https://github.com/screenpipe/screenpipe. We took the dreaded step of making our own Screenpipe Commercial License. I know HN strongly prefers OSI open source (MIT/Apache/etc.) but couldn’t find a sustainable way to keep developing Screenpipe while companies were using it commercially for free. So now personal non-commercial, nonprofit, educational, and research use is free, but commercial use requires a license.
Versions released before the license change remain available under MIT. We have a free tier, and other plans, including Enterprise which helps companies find automation opportunities.
Would love to hear any feedback, things you've done with screenpipe, or features you'd want
How are you planing to segregate between professional use and personal use, I dont want any agent or any llm to know all the time what i have been doing on my system, it would be privacy nightmare and most of the time the screencapture is not meaningful. People may use their work laptop or devices to checkout reddit or hackernews occasionally.
You can define websites or apps to filter out. You can also define a recording schedule, for example stop recording on weekend
Funny timing. I've been building something similar in my spare time called Daydream. There’s a lot of overlap: local screen/audio capture, OCR and transcription, window and activity context, SQLite, and a searchable memory of what happened.
The main difference is the product direction. Screenpipe seems focused on continuously giving agents context through APIs, MCP, and skills. Daydream is more narrowly built around answering "what did I do today?" through a timeline you can inspect, replay, search, and turn into a daily digest.
I'm also treating deletion as part of the data model. If you cut a sensitive span, its frames, audio, OCR, transcripts, embeddings, and summaries should be deleted or invalidated too.
Mine is still early and Linux-first. I'm open-sourcing it in case anyone wants to contribute, poke around, or use it as a starting point. It’s built with Tauri, a Rust backend, React/TypeScript, SQLite, GStreamer, Whisper, OCR, and VLM processing.
I genuinely didn’t know you were building this when I started. Apparently personal memory capture is becoming a SaaS category too lol.
Code is here: https://github.com/snackbit/daydream
Awesome thanks for sharing, will follow closely :)
I built a similar app last week just for fun https://github.com/JGalego/HiddenSteps WIP will definitely check yours out
That's great. I like the comparison to Celonis etc. We're sort of offering a privacy-first alternative to them for Enterprise
I tried this ~ a week ago, tried one of the suggested automations and it pretty immediately started sending my local api keys to an endpoint… afk right now but can share more when I’m back
Would love to get in a call and help you setup the privacy settings properly, although default are filtering API keys, my cal link if you want:
https://cal.com/team/screenpipe/chat
Feel free to configure local LLM like Ollama, btw
reading comments, so much overlap with existing harnesses. how this can survive and be monetisable and stand any change in competition is a question.
You had my interest until "source available". Especially when you used MIT from the start and changed it later. FOSS hackers like me feel betrayed by moves like that because your product was built on FOSS others created and you are not paying that forward.
Also, I for one would never invest a second in tools I cannot freely modify and share the code of under OSI terms. I would strongly suggest a convenience tax model. Hackers will self host and maybe contribute but those with more money than time will put in a credit card. Maybe offer end to end encrypted memory and compute to secure enclaves where additional compute on the data can be done when the laptop is closed. (Shameless plug, this is what https://caution.co enables, and 100% FOSS)
However, with "source available" you are just begging for someone to AI launder your code into a FOSS clone you will have 0 recourse on. If you FOSS it yourself then you get to capture the FOSS community destined to form around this idea. Some of that community will have bosses that will pay you.
MIT may not be the right play though. AGPL is a good middle ground as it flips the script. Corpo lawyers are allergic to AGPL and will pay for an alternative license, but for community hackers that might want to improve and recommend your code it offers no restrictions.
Hey I'm sorry that it's not convenient license for you, and you're right that we should have set this license early on instead of switching.
We're open to more feedback, things could change in the future
Been a user of Screenpipe to build some "Ai-buddies" for me since last year. Core of that is giving AI a look at what is happening in time space. Without Screenpipe this was rather hard to do at the performance screenpipe gives.
That's interesting, thanks! Indeed we did a lot of work to optimize performance and reliability.
I'm curious what does your AI buddies do more specifically and how do you use them?
How does it run the LLMs? Or does it call a API to llama.cpp/ollama/etc. ?
During normal usage, how often does it try to parse info from the screen capture? Once a minute?
You can decide which AI provider you use, either local through Ollama for example, using your own cloud API key, or using Screenpipe cloud. We also support confidential inference through tinfoil.sh
Screenpipe captures accessibility tree and screenshot when you perform a meaningful action. It doesn't use AI at recording time (except PII removal and OCR infrequently). So it can be every few hundred milliseconds to few minutes or more (if screen idle or sleeping)
We usually benchmark CPU usage on $200 Windows/MacOS laptop
Implementation specifics aside, I increasingly think life and death cycles are preferable. The opposite of omnipotent context, I want cycles of clean slates so that baggage - of all kinds - does not weigh down the new.
I think this is true for some tasks where you want a clean slate, but increasingly I find myself constantly referencing specific skills, or having files with prompts I use all the time. I'd much rather have an agent that remembers things about me and specifics about my workflows and "taste" - of course having the ability to reset context sometimes or prune memory is valuable but I think the future of agentic AI is blocked on "omnipotent context"
Yeah there’s a need for the distilled learnings of all past hard earned insights. But i think much of the value is in the distillation.
in my experience, even within a single project, the more agentic cycles, the more features and the more surface area the more cruft builds up. This is an obvious observation, but I suppose I’m at the point I think the move forward is to create a new project, keep only what worked from the preceding as modularized entities and intentionally wipe away all past of how we got there save for the API interface truths.
Interesting, I partly agree. It sounds like how the human brain works, but what nature learned is not necessarily what we should keep
We capture everything and gives you and option for a flexible data retention policy, so that you can prune mp4 files for example or verbose accessibility trees, while our agents generate high level memories referencing low level data
It still not perfect, but ideally Screenpipe would record forever so that you have infinite memory of every tiny details, while having high level structured memories for humans and agents, individually or as a company
guys, there are more then 2 colors!
hehe, any color suggestions?
where did all the colors go?
note the audio level on the tella.tv video is significantly lower (as compared to the youtube video)
Well, i'm not sure who your customers are (except companies in Russia, NK..), but european employers would break laws by allowing your software to be used, long even before AI became a thing and especially after the EU AI Act has passed. To put it mildly, no sane corporation would allow such software to be used which tells me a bit about the sanity of the current VC landscape.
Out of interest, would it not be allowed even if the company hosted screenpipe on prem (which seems to be what they do)?
I think he's picturing it as being used by employer's to monitor employees.
Anything that tracks employees actions beyond high-level "are they doing their job according to the job descriptions" is forbidden by privacy laws and otherwise will be striken down by a workers council.
That's not just specific to digital stuff. E.g. warehouse cameras that film anything else beyond securing entries/exits, like they are commonplace in e.g. the US don't exist for the same reason.
looks like another throwaway YC project. did you guys cash out yet?
YC trully disappoints last couple years. did anything good came out in like last 5̶ 10 years from YC?
"Karpethy" you mean "Karpathy"? cmon.
How do you secure the database on my device?
We protect the Rust API by a token and the PII model redact information in the database. You can configure which categories to redact
We also have early support for encryption at rest through our CLI
you mean train your agents to replace myself and everybody else?
This sounds so ripe for abuse and so terrifying if it were that I don't even want to experiment with it. Sorry.
Fair concern but the risk is similar to any tool you give deep access to like Claude, Codex, or even your operating system
Ultimately, it’s up to you what you run and trust
Screenpipe is open source and local-first
You can inspect it and keep your data on-device, with encryption at rest
Until some rogue agent decides that it looks pretty useful because there’s a ton of it and uploads it to Claude or Codex.
and what endpoint would it use to upload those files? what's the authentication needed for those endpoints? why would everyone on earth fail to notice these exfiltration endpoints if they exist?
you're being unnecessarily hostile about a threat that almost certainly doesn't exist. And if it does, you can absolutely block those uploads before they even happen. In fact if you don't already block uploads to hosts you don't know about, then you're not really taking anything seriously, are you?
> Screenpipe is open source and local-first
Source available *
zero chance im trusting any cloud or third party SaaS
if this doesn't run fully local its a no go for enterprise let alone ordinary users
It's local, and for enterprise it runs on premise
Warning: this link automatically downloads a .dmg file without asking.
https://screenpipe.com /how-to-install
Sorry about that and thanks for letting me know, fixing right now
This company harvested user data and abused it by the https://skerritt.blog/screenpipe-ai-company-will-harvest-you...
I am not surprised. YC hasn't been the same since Gary Tan. I don't want to be associated with it or launch anything through it.
I don't know anything about this company and what it may or may not have done, but to be clear, the link just says that when you star their github repo, they add your email address to their marketing list.
I think that sucks, but it's certainly not what I thought of when I read your one-liner (which implies that they harvest and abuse your actual recorded data).
Hey sorry about that, it's been a while ago, we didn't know that emails on Github were not allowed to be used (since I received many emails from startups that way). We apologized to our users and never did this again
You're offended by that?
Have you ever founded a company and tried to find paying customers?
You'd probably be offended if I sent you a cute 90's era AOL CD with our software on it.
OP: I wouldn't be offended if you emailed me in this way. Ignore the naysayers. This is perfectly kosher.
In fact, I'm going to check out your company in depth just because of this pearl clutching.
Keep building and don't let naysayers tear you down over something not even slightly evil. (Venomous attacks are more evil than this, frankly.)