What is Zanei?
An open-source tool that records your on-screen activity locally and turns it into LLM-ready timelines for AI agents.
Zanei (残映, zan-ei) records what you are doing on your computer from OS-level events, not screen recordings, and lets you retrieve it in a form AI agents can read directly.
zanei timeline --since 2hThis returns the last two hours of your activity as a Markdown timeline, split into sessions and deduplicated. Coding agents like Claude Code or Codex CLI can read it to understand what you were just working on.
What you can do with it
Resume work
Tell your agent to pick up where you left off. It reads the timeline to find the PR you were reviewing, the files you were editing, and the pages you were reading.
Search your activity
“Which Stripe doc was I reading yesterday?” Query raw events filtered by time range, app, or event type.
Standups and work logs
Feed a day’s timeline to your agent and get a draft of your daily report in seconds.
Context for agents
Zanei connects to major agents over the CLI and MCP, with shipped skill files. Chat clients that cannot run the CLI, such as Claude Desktop, are covered over MCP.
Design principles
Activity history is sensitive data, so the defaults are conservative:
| Principle | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Local-only, encrypted at rest | There is no network path for sending your data anywhere. The store file is encrypted; the key stays in your login Keychain. |
| No screen recording | No screenshots, no screen-capture APIs. Only OS accessibility and event information. |
| No keystroke content by default | Only the fact that typing happened and the field type are recorded. Capturing content is an explicit opt-in. |
| Sensitive data excluded | Password fields, Chrome Incognito URLs, and password managers are excluded by default. |
| Short-lived retention | Events are deleted automatically after 48 hours by default. |
See the privacy model for details.
How it works
Zanei captures OS events such as app switches, window focus, UI interactions, and browser URL changes, normalizes them, applies privacy processing, and writes them to a local SQLite store. Everything that reads data back (CLI, MCP) is a thin wrapper over the same store.
Two interfaces
| Interface | Role |
|---|---|
| CLI | The core surface. A single zanei binary handles recording control, permission diagnostics, timeline retrieval, and filter management. |
| MCP server | A read-only view over the same store. The only path for chat clients that cannot run the CLI, such as Claude Desktop. |
For agents, zanei setup also provides a skill: instructions telling the agent when to call Zanei. It installs the skill for agents with native support and prints derived instructions for other CLI agents. MCP tools carry their own descriptions inside the protocol.
Platform support
- macOS, currently. Release binaries are signed and notarized, with no external runtime dependencies. Install with
brew install kentoshimizu/tap/zanei. - Browser URL capture supports Google Chrome and Safari. See the event reference for the reasoning and per-browser status.
- Windows and Linux are on the roadmap.