Show HN: Understudy – Teach a desktop agent by demonstrating a task once

github.com - 46 poäng - 11 kommentarer - 12608 sekunder sedan

I built Understudy because a lot of real work still spans native desktop apps, browser tabs, terminals, and chat tools. Most current agents live in only one of those surfaces.

Understudy is a local-first desktop agent runtime that can operate GUI apps, browsers, shell tools, files, and messaging in one session. The part I'm most interested in feedback on is teach-by-demonstration: you do a task once, the agent records screen video + semantic events, extracts the intent rather than coordinates, and turns it into a reusable skill.

Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d5cRGnlb_0

In the demo I teach it: Google Image search -> download a photo -> remove background in Pixelmator Pro -> export -> send via Telegram. Then I ask it to do the same for Elon Musk. The replay isn't a brittle macro: the published skill stores intent steps, route options, and GUI hints only as a fallback. In this example it can also prefer faster routes when they are available instead of repeating every GUI step.

Current state: macOS only. Layers 1-2 are working today; Layers 3-4 are partial and still early.

    npm install -g @understudy-ai/understudy
    understudy wizard

GitHub: https://github.com/understudy-ai/understudy

Happy to answer questions about the architecture, teach-by-demonstration, or the limits of the current implementation.

Kommentarer (7)

wuweiaxin - 8860 sekunder sedan
The demonstration-based approach is interesting for the handoff problem. The hardest part of agentic automation isnt the first run -- its making the agent robust to the cases the demonstrator never showed it. How do you handle edge cases or failures mid-task? Does it fall back to asking the user, or does it have some recovery heuristic? Asking because we found that the failure mode surface matters more than happy-path coverage when you actually deploy these in production.
abraxas - 7790 sekunder sedan
One more tool targeting OSX only. That platform is overserved with desktop agents already while others are underserved, especially Linux.
- 7884 sekunder sedan
jedreckoning - 6737 sekunder sedan
cool idea. good idea doing a demo as well.
sukhdeepprashut - 9215 sekunder sedan
2026 and we still pretend to not understand how llms work huh
aiwithapex - 8142 sekunder sedan
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webpolis - 5143 sekunder sedan
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