screenpipe

Screenpipe records your screen and audio continuously and keeps all of it on your machine. The recording is not the end in itself: the captured history becomes context for agents such as Claude or Codex, so you can ask what you saw an hour ago, or have an automation act on the work you just finished.

Capture goes deeper than pixels. It reads the full accessibility tree with OCR as a fallback, transcribes audio with speaker labels, and logs keyboard input and application switches. Everything lands in local storage that you search in natural language or query directly through read only SQLite access.

The resource cost is stated plainly, which matters for anything always on.

• Footprint: 5 to 10 percent CPU, half a gigabyte to 3 gigabytes of RAM, and roughly 20 gigabytes of storage per month.
• Filters: capture is filtered by window, application and Chrome extension, with password exclusion and a model that strips personally identifiable information.
• Encryption: encryption at rest is optional, and the whole system works offline.
• Agent wiring: an MCP server plugs the history into Claude and other coding agents, installed with one setup command.
• Pipes: automations built on the captured stream can act on what you do, updating a tracker whenever you work on a given task.

A desktop app carries every feature and auto-updates, while the CLI covers headless use through npx. One caveat deserves attention: the code is source available rather than open source, so read the license file before you build on it commercially.