Show HN: Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen (github.com)

354 pointsby franze11 hours ago151 comments

sicktriple 6 hours ago

Man, just when it seemed like we had it all. Computers were cheap, efficient and powerful. Somehow we figured out a way to accomplish tasks we already had solved except now it's 1000x more expensive, requires the combined electricity of the entire world, is reliant on someone else's rented compute, and now I need a robot to tell me what button to press. What a time to be alive.

sudo_cowsay 5 hours ago

On the other hand, (while you made a completely valid point,) some people who are new to a field, like young aspiring computer scientists who don't know how to do some stuff and need a guiding hand, will find this tremendously useful. Also, technology and compute power has been growing a tremendous amount over the past 5-10 years (now we have 20-100 billion transistors in chips!). <-- enough to sustain this wild use of compute

Indeed, what a time to be able.

alanbernstein 4 hours ago

Valid points, but this sounds extremely useful for learning complicated GUI applications like 3d modeling or media editing apps.

ASalazarMX 4 hours ago

Valid point, but the solution is wasteful and overengineered. Imagine if videogames needed an external datacenter to run the tutorial levels.

fasterik 3 hours ago

Sounds like an opportunity for a good engineer to come in and write something with the same functionality that runs locally and efficiently. The claim that it's wasteful only holds water if the non-wasteful solution exists and can accomplish the same tasks.

arcanemachiner 2 hours ago

I am willing to bet you could run a model capable of using this on a 12GB 3060 + some RAM. (Qwen 3.6 35B)

Even the data centre using this probably uses less net energy, and costs less, to build one of these dumb arrows than the aggregate sum of the energy used to keep you alive while you Googled for the answer. (Including heating/cooling the building, powering the equipment growing the food you eat, etc.)

serf 4 hours ago

i've read enough 'shlemiel the painter' ports across hundreds of systems and thousands of examples that I must quickly and coldly dismiss the precept that computers were ever used efficiently.

Anon1096 4 hours ago

Now imagine what people back in the day thought about going from assembly to C. Or C to Java. Or, forgive me for even saying it, Java to Python.

godelski 3 hours ago

For ages people have been saying "it's obvious" or "it's intuitive", without learning anything about design principles. Obvious to who?

People have been saying "we don't need docs", "nobody reads docs", "they'll figure it out". They experience the pain of a new employee onboarding but never treat this as a signal for the user experience. The user can't just walk over to the developer's desk. But luckily we got stack overflow, blogs, and Google. Somewhere someone explains it! The problem became finding it!

But hey, why do things the "hard" way when you can just throw money at the problem? Or better yet, dismiss the problem by calling the user an idiot.

You're right. What a time to be alive. We've created a world where this product is useful. And not even to because dark patterns exist, but simply because we've always wanted to avoid taking a step back and thinking or getting an outside view. Because it isn't obvious if a robot has to teach you what button to press. If it does, you probably should be ashamed (there are, as always, exceptions)

That said, I do think there's still a lot of utility you this. Those exceptions aren't uncommon. This'll help people learn programs like FreeCAD or Blender, or whatever. Where the complexity is naturally high. But also I do think we should recognize the silliness of many problems that this does solve that shouldn't be problems in the first place.

joquarky an hour ago

> Obvious to who?

Garage sale signs are a good example of this. The person making the sign knows what it says, so they can "read" it from farther away than someone who doesn't already know what it says.

CamperBob2 2 hours ago

If you look at the example animations, it's clear that Apple has brought this entirely upon themselves. Don't yell at some guys who are trying to fix it.

scotty79 32 minutes ago

In 40 year software designers couldn't figure out that there should be a search function for every functionality that your computer provides.

When we got a form of such search, it searched all of the internet alongside with the functions of your software on your computer. You had to tell it manually what software you have and when it found something you had to fish out the description of what to click to get the functionality you are seeking and then click through some dumb ui to actually invoke it.

Agents are the first thing that can lead you directly from "I know what I want my computer to do." to "Actually doing it."

Success of agents is founded on the profound and sustained failure of all of the software designers and developers ever.

1718627440 6 minutes ago

> In 40 year software designers couldn't figure out that there should be a search function for every functionality that your computer provides.

apropos ?

redanddead 12 minutes ago

Human in the loop is the superior workflow!

hn8726 10 hours ago

I tried to read the "Does it need Screen Recording or Accessibility?" part, but it's slopped to the point I have no clue what it's trying to say. But if it can draw on top of permission prompts, what's stopping it from drawing box that hides the "decline" button and changing the "approve" button copy?

tkdb 9 hours ago

...and there we have it. Slop assumes a verb form.

andai 8 hours ago

Ensloppification!

layer8 8 hours ago

“Slop” has been a verb for a long time: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slop#Verb

trollbridge 8 hours ago

Indeed, I’ve heard it on the context of feeding animals my entire life.

tkdb 7 hours ago

You know the rules. Now that it's AI slopping it's new and innovative.

tottenhm 6 hours ago

Some words reverberate.

causal 9 hours ago

I wonder if someday we will get to the point where Github repos are just markdown files describing the project and then you just let your own agent implement it because why the hell would I trust your agent's implementation?

cyanydeez 9 hours ago

if all your models are in the cloud, why would you trust anything your agent builds

jerf 8 hours ago

That sounds cynical today, but that's just because the AI models are currently outrunning enshittification. I'm already pondering personal plans about what to do when that turns around. We haven't seen enshittification yet that is going to be like the enshittification of AI. It may even deserve a new term of its very own, it's going to be such a big problem. The AI companies are leaving a lot of value on the table to entice us on to their systems but at some point that's going to turn around.

cyanydeez 8 hours ago

The existential danger exists today: you're providing your entire business toolchain to models in the cloud, owned by businesses who are for profit entity. Even if the model itself doesn't care about your data, the business model does.

Everything your building is now streaming through a third party who could steal it, the same way Amazon steals open source software and repackages it.

All you need to do is look at palentir's forward deployed engineers. Once you let a third party observe your processed, you're cloneable and replaceable _as an entity_.

I think we can look at our own human psychology as it developed into social groups. If our brains were obviously deterministic, it would be easy for people to prey upon us via structured inputs. Some level of randomness in our thought process is almost evolutionarily required to avoid becoming part of the larger super structure, similar to an ant colony.

So these AI companies are definitely more dangerous than just the "AI is super intelligence". They're basically a intelligence platform everyone is wiring into.

That's today. Tomorrow, they'll be run by an MBA which is the enshittification.

jack_pp 7 hours ago

software businesses are not like watches (recently saw a youtube video about fakes being made virtually identical at 10% of the price).

If you can make a facebook clone it doesn't mean you can steal facebook's lunch. there are exceptions of course.

mat_b 2 hours ago

> Some level of randomness in our thought process is almost evolutionarily required to avoid becoming part of the larger super structure, similar to an ant colony.

Not really. Ants are superorganisms, they share more than half of their DNA with each other. You could think of each ant as being like a cell in a human.

nater5000 7 hours ago

Seriously. I imagine this will be the case soon enough in some shape or form.

Whenever I see these vibecoded apps, my move is to just do what you've described: point an agent at it and tell it to reproduce it (usually with my own little customizations). It's a bit absurd, but I don't trust that they vibecoded the app as well as "I" could lol.

Abimelex 7 hours ago

A 100%! Just imagine you could describe every solution to a problem just using language! Of cause you would to make sure to avoid ANY missunderstanding, but therfore you could invent a language specified for avoiding ambiguity. I could imagine just to reduce the words to a very small corpus so everybody can remember it and have a very strict grammar so a program can effortlessly check correctness of its sentences.

ccozan 6 hours ago

I hope someone reads your post. I had to laugh hysterically when I reached the end. The level of sarcasm is too high.

joquarky an hour ago

You have not experienced spec writing until you have written them in the original Klingon.

tempest_ 6 hours ago

This only works while tokens are artificially cheap. The gravy train could come to an end at some point.

The open models that are chasing the frontier labs will stop being open once things slow down and there is less incentive to undercut the front runners. Time will tell if GPU compute gets cheap enough to run stuff locally.

ccozan 6 hours ago

/goal build this but better

zaik 5 hours ago

This post makes me want to buy Nvidia stocks.

theropost 7 hours ago

Isn't it already kind of like that? Except the agent reads the code as if it's markdown. There's really no difference anymore, is there?

fennecfoxy 7 hours ago

Eh I think it'll be more like Gibson's defensive ICE in that ICE is "my swarm of agents scans your code for nasties, then compiles it from source".

pydry 6 hours ago

First you'd have to stop the agents from flagging hundreds of irrelevant nasties.

I think the next generation of exploit will be putting up code all over the internet that does x, y and z and then when asked to one shot whatever that code does the agents bake in the exploit that was indirectly included in their training corpus.

glitchc 6 hours ago

Neither party owns their agents though. Is it simply then a matter of "my subscription is better than your subscription"?

m-s-y 6 hours ago

ding ding! we have a winner!

glitchc 6 hours ago

Sounds like Github is optional at that point. Why not just use Medium or WordPress?

lstodd 5 hours ago

reddit! use reddit!

asdff 5 hours ago

Just tell claude to share it with other claude users

jaggederest 5 hours ago

Here's a couple examples, I've seen others as well:

https://github.com/seb3773/ntfs-repair-rfc

https://github.com/Kotivskyi/screenshot-tool

I think it was more popular around the beginning of the year to mid-year

asdff 5 hours ago

With enough model drift that won’t even work over time. These files would have to be pinned to the intended model version and that is either used directly or emulated with a faithful emulator in a larger model.

rrr_oh_man 4 hours ago

llmpm

cootsnuck 4 hours ago

I doubt that will be a problem. Models are different enough right now. If you can write a spec with enough detail and constraints today to get valid and comparable output from say GPT-6 Astra, Opus 5.5, DSV4F, Kimi K3, GLM 5.3, etc... Then I think there's a good chance that whatever SoTA coding LLMs everyone is using 3 years from now will also be able to implement that same spec.

Again, I think it heavily depends on if people are writing comprehensive specs with sufficient detail.

asdff 2 hours ago

That depends on if you are really getting what you expect from the spec or you are actually relying on undefined behavior for your expected output from the spec. This is why we often pin software library versions: we may very well be relying on unintended or a bugged behavior to get out expected output.

SwtCyber 8 hours ago

Nothing stops it, except the fact that the agent is already executing arditrary code in your shell. If it's malicious, it'll just steal your shh keys directly instead of bothering with button masking

hannasanarion 7 hours ago

The fact that the utility doesn't give it the ability to do that?

It makes sense to not trust AI models with the ability to read and alter your screen for many many many reasons, but the developer of the tool knows that as well. A tool that lets your ai do something doesn't also let it do anything.

So, as always, it's a question of if you trust the software producer. You're giving them the ability to draw on your screen too. Would you have the same fear if there were no AI involved?

For stuff like this I imagine AI misbehavior as a novel failure trigger not a novel failure type. It can only do the harm that the software was able to do on its own already.

smugglerFlynn 7 hours ago

Don't tell me you are reading readmes with your eyes in 2026. Blasphemy!

internet101010 an hour ago

The worst trend in UX in the last decade is the endless "Got it!" popups and feature notifications that distract the user from what they were trying to do.

I don't know why anyone would ever willingly want this.

tangotaylor 7 hours ago

"It is an arrow, so we spent an unreasonable amount of time on how it looks."

Brilliant. This is exactly the kind of content I seek when I visit Hacker News.

Truly art.

socializer 7 hours ago

Have you actually looked at this? In the first screenshot, three of the five arrows are obviously and badly misaligned, have incorrect labels, and it's just a big tangled mess (edit: the author stealth-replaced the screenshot, but the original is here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/franzenzenhofer/big-arrow-...). The LLM-generated text may be saying one thing, but there's clearly zero effort spent on... anything. There's no punchline, there's no aesthetic angle, there's no conceivable purpose.

It's just the epitome of living in an era where code is so cheap to generate that we don't invest any effort into even fully fleshing out the idea. It's just "Claude, make me a program that draws arrows on screen". And HN, I guess, is dominated by two groups: one still stuck in the mentality of "code = effort" and trying to recognize that; and another stuck in the mentality of "AI = cool".

usrbinbash 9 hours ago

SO the point of this is ... what exactly?

A big arrow to an interface element which ... has a label that explains what it does?

So...a label for a label?

voidUpdate 9 hours ago

It's so your agent can make a big arrow on the screen saying "click this, human" so that it can keep doing things

andyfilms1 9 hours ago

I love living in the future!

ghm2180 8 hours ago

Glad you asked. Pointing my aging aunt to the right place on the screen to click without having to take control of her laptop, of course.

mistersquid 7 hours ago

I ran two experiments which require the `claude` CLI tool be installed.

For the first experiment, Claude stepped me through how to edit its settings.json to remove warnings from its configuration: a little clunky as I had to respond to Claude's CLI prompts to get it to auto run.

In the second experiment, Claude walked me through how to use Apple's Compressor.app to speed up a video. It walked me through dragging the file into compressor and clicking on the appropriate UI elements to do this.

So, one use case for the bigarrow skill enables Claude to step users through a relatively complex UI to accomplish a task.

There are likely more efficient ways to accomplish the tasks at hand (e.g. ffmpeg for the second experiment), but this use case is interesting if using a GUI tool is required.

hannasanarion 7 hours ago

It seems silly but I think there's a good use case for this:

Helping people deal with bad UX.

Everybody who has worked in a traditional corporate environment has encountered poorly tutorialized, poorly labeled, counterintuitive user interfaces where the only way to know how to get something done is to have somebody sit over your shoulder and tell you which buttons to click.

Oh, you want to figure out which OIM entitlements your coworker has that you don't to debug an access issue? You just need to know that you have to click the "compliance" button to get there. Why is it called "compliance" when what it actually does is let you export comparisons from the user tables? Because fuck you that's why. Memorize it.

An AI assistant that can read the procedures for you, or sometimes even read the source code, or the website code, can show you how to accomplish something that the UI on its own fails to do.

wartywhoa23 4 hours ago

Wait, I was under impression that UX was to be sorted out by AI just like the code is?

cobbal 6 hours ago

Finally we've built the reverse centaur from Cory Doctorow's classic novel "Don't Become the Reverse Centaur"

arshxyz 10 hours ago

The README is geared towards technical people (complete with the HN screenshot) but when I see a tool like this all I can think of is how helpful this would be for my mom when I'm trying to tell her how to download and print a document over the phone

conception 10 hours ago

Honestly the giant arrow annotation Zoom has makes it worth any amount of money compared to the competition.

prmoustache 3 hours ago

Except your mom just have to tell her AI agent to download and print that document.

She doesn't have to call you anymore.

kogus 4 hours ago

My first reaction was similar to the reaction I'd have if you told me that cockroaches had learned to unlock doors and stand on their hind legs. But then I thought about accessibility, and the ways this could be used to help technologically illiterate or disabled people, and I thought again.

Do you remember when PCs used to come with a completely soup-to-nuts tutorial that would talk to you like you had never seen a PC before? Things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ScS4OYDfHE

This kind of baked-in interactivity could really help in a training or disability context.

isoprophlex 10 hours ago

Literally unusable as it is. Some minimal extra features this would need:

- rainbow dripping arrows

- angrily pointing arrows

- flame-surrounded text boxes with particle effects

- the ability for the agent to play airhorn.wav at max volume, overriding existing volume or mute settings

EDIT: ayy lmao https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/big-arrow-on-the-screen/p...

thih9 10 hours ago

At the risk of stating the obvious - let's not do that, the goal of this repo is to be useful and not to give agents the power of the `<blink>` tag.

ipsod 10 hours ago

under_construction.gif

isoprophlex 9 hours ago

just submitted the airhorn PR; ~second rainbow arrow slop grenade incoming~ BOOM slop cannon fired

franze 4 hours ago

thx, not merged but great PR https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/big-arrow-on-the-screen/p...

ipsod 34 minutes ago

Lol, that's awesome.

koalacola 10 hours ago

Oh dear, they were making a joke.

yen223 10 hours ago

if only there was a way to make a subtle thing obvious

isoprophlex 10 hours ago

such as... angry flaming rainbow textboxes and arrows?

ale42 9 hours ago

I thought that the dripping rainbow ones were enough. Maybe you have to ask for rainbow unicorns flying on the screen.

DonHopkins 9 hours ago

For the humor impared, it would also be useful to have a colorful animated "WHOOSH" overlay with sound effects for every time a deadpan joke goes over your head. ;)

Maybe isoprophlex will add that to his PR!

voidUpdate 9 hours ago

> ""I need you, and you're making coffee." --say reads the sign aloud. Your Mac will literally call you back to your desk."

It's already got the power to be obnoxious at you

jaapz 8 hours ago

the repo is one big joke, of course they should add this

htrp 10 hours ago

This is where the agent says did not understand sarcasm coded and shipped features

DonHopkins 9 hours ago

Last time I accidentally said something sarcasticly over-ambitious to an LLM, it shipped this popup callout tooltip feature on a PDP-7 Type 340 vector graphics display emulator that shows you the meaning of the drawing you're pointing at, as well as the address of the instruction that drew it.

https://hyperties.org/cabinet/symelec/

PIXIE and FORTH on PDP-7 Cabinet Emulator with Type 340 Vector Graphics Display:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8kdY-5i6c

dihinbutt 7 hours ago

W developer

lbreakjai 10 hours ago

I would pay good money for something like this on iPad. It wouldn't even need to be agent-driven, just a big "I want to make a bank transfer" button, that would launch the correct app and guide through the interface.

That would be a godsent for those of us with aging parents.

ghm2180 9 hours ago

> That would be a godsent for those of us with aging parents.

Right yeah? I mean I have freagin remote desktop installed on all my parent's devices. I am the agent for them every time they call frantically for help.

It's Time to redesign the apple genius bar for the modern aging boomer using this.

alansaber 6 hours ago

OP has inspired me to write up my tedious thoughts on agent GUIs if of interest https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50022688

cyberjunkie 10 hours ago

I'm just as impressed by this as any other LLM-generated project.

priyashunt 6 hours ago

Very VERY USABLE FOR old PEOPLE. I would pay good money for something like this on iPad!

vessenes 11 hours ago

Interesting. When I read the headline I imagined this would be a sort of thinking trace booster -- letting the agent focus its own attention on different parts of the screen. But this is cool in a different way. I bet agentic harnesses would find it useful for communicating with other agents / themselves as well.

alansaber 10 hours ago

This might be goofy, but it underscores that there's potential for more visual agent UIUX than reading off a sidebar/opening modals.

melvinroest 10 hours ago

My message to the world is that LLMs should be able to point anything they see in the application they're in or even the whole computer (if you give it that kind of access).

For web apps, WebMCP is a way where you can make a frontend way more discoverable to an LLM rather than that it is going to read all your code. I sometimes create this in my apps at home and sometimes in my apps at work and it makes LLM assistants way more usable. It also helps if they can highlight certain things of a visual.

We humans can do this too on paper. We can point at something, we can highlight something with a marker. Why not give an LLM these capabilities as well?

FinnLobsien 10 hours ago

This could be great for documentation. Screenshots in docs are frequently useless because they show me a screen and say "click X" where I still have to search X visually. And I could just to dhat in the other tab I have open.

peaxkl 9 hours ago

It doesn’t make sense that you have to read a whole article and then still search for the buttons in the UI afterwards. And with longer articles, you always have to keep the article open next to your product to follow the whole flow.

We built something to help with that [1].

[1] https://www.happysupport.ai/en/in-app-messaging

alexpotato 8 hours ago

> Arrows have existed since roughly the Paleolithic.

Whenever I use web tools that don't have "deep linking" [0], I love to throw out this quote:

"Have we thought about using hyperlinks? They are these SUPER useful things that were invented in Switzerland back in the 1990s."

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking

swframe2 6 hours ago

I want this for the visualization of very difficult to solve application evolution. This is for problems which have no known solution and are too complicated for an agent to figure out on its own. My current problem: can alphafold and related tools figure out the function of a gene that so far is unknown. Think of the monte carlo tree search in the alphago explanation videos. What if there was visualization that showed how the policy and value models worked so you can spot their flaws. I want the agent to build an attempt at a solution, then build a visualization of it, then run the solution and show me what is it up to. I want to it pause and explain its state so I can see exactly where and why the solution fails.

satyanash 11 hours ago

Am I missing something here?

What terminal / agentic workflows spawn the demonstrated dialogue boxes that require the User to click/reject the action? Aren't most such flows actually inline UIs? And finally, if the core issue is that these confirmation boxes are tied to the terminal that triggered them, which does not autofocus, what's the point of said "big arrow" that is also lurking behind without focus?

If the said "big arrow" automatically gains focus, isn't the real fix here to just make the dialogue boxes themselves gain focus automatically? Both are similarly disruptive anyway.

inanutshellus 11 hours ago

The first example (of HN) is the one that feels like it has the most potential to me.

"Teach me to do this" kinda stuff. "Guiding agent" rather than "doing agent".

Honestly, @franze, if you're reading this, maybe update your screenshots to show an agent in tutorial mode on some complicated app?

ravila4 9 hours ago

I think this would’ve been very handy to me a couple years ago when I was learning to use Blender and asking LLMs for help performing certain actions like “how do I display the normals of all the vertices in my mesh?” I spent a lot of time trying to figure out which button the model was talking about.

dr_kiszonka 6 hours ago

I take this opportunity to shame GitHub for completely ignoring the mobile experience in their own Android app. The project's README is pages upon pages of largely blank space. In general, the app does not render mermaid diagrams and does not allow for zooming in, so smaller pictures are unusable. Even if you access pictures directly in a repo's source, you still can't zoom in. iPython Notebooks, which are extremely common in data science, are an "unsupported file type" and are not rendered.

(OP, nice project! Sorry for my rant.)

bel8 6 hours ago

I'm forced to use GH mobile app because of 2FA.

But it's a subpar experience compared to just opening github on the browser.

ElijahLynn 2 hours ago

This is going to be really useful actually, nice work! Can't wait for it to be on Linux too!

m-s-y 9 hours ago

Genuine question…

Why does this need to be a skill? Literally just ask Claude to “call out actions in these screenshots with numbered stylized arrows” and you get the same thing without burning tens of thousands of tokens in context.

ballofrubber1 9 hours ago

With a skill claude will know when to use it without you specifically prompting it.

IanCal 9 hours ago

There is a skill, but you don't have to use it, though you'd have to explain how to use the app.

> burning tens of thousands of tokens in context.

~1400?

> Literally just ask Claude to “call out actions in these screenshots with numbered stylized arrows”

Is there a macos native thing it uses? Or are you talking about screenshots? This draws on your screen instead.

TekMol 11 hours ago

Swift, Shell, Python and Objective-C

Does one need 4 programming languages to draw something on a mac?

sitzkrieg 11 hours ago

welcome to zombocom. err i mean modern HN :-(

iandanforth 6 hours ago

Pointing is surprisingly overlooked in a lot of tools and I look forward to using this. It reminds me of what I thought was a killer feature on AnyBots telepresense robots, they had a laser you could use to point at things while piloting the robot.

ghm2180 9 hours ago

Man, Ive lost count of How many times have I had to repeat this over the phone to my parents; The repo has all the punch lines in the README

> "It's this window, not that one." You have 14 Chrome windows. The agent knows which one it means: --window "Google Chrome:Pull request". It even picks the right tab: --app "Google Chrome:Pull request".

> Remote help. "No, the other gear icon." Point at it instead of describing it.