What if we had a second set of eyes on our computer screen to augment our work? A set of eyes that help us remember the info on our screen, or our workflows. A set of eyes that understand what we are trying to accomplish or troubleshoot, and help us by surfacing helpful suggestions or fixes.
Essential is an attempt in this direction. It is an open source MacOS app built for developers. You can currently ask it to fixit and remember, with more in the works.
Essential is an app that runs on the Mac and keeps track of the last 5 minutes of your screen. It harnesses the power of Computer Vision and OpenAI's LLMs to understand what's on your screen and can help you troubleshoot any error messages you run into. Whether it is build failures in your IDE, or error logs and stacktraces in your terminal or browser, ⌘-tab
over to Essential, and you'll see a fix that works in your context. No need to copy paste error messages to search for solutions, or figuring out how to apply a fix in your context!
Essential is a memory layer for your screen. Whenever you read/do something you feel would be useful for later reference, simply ⌘-tab
over to the app, and you'll see a summarized story with screenshots of the most important moments from your recent work, ready for you to hit Remember
. OCR on the screen contents enables powerful recall, and stories are automatically categorized into sections to help you quickly get to the information you seek. All of this happens entirely on your Mac, with no data ever leaving your system.
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