Familiar watches your screen so your AI can update its memory, skills, and knowledge.
We created Familiar to capture our screen (and clipboard) every 4 seconds and save it as markdown. That way our local agent can use that as context (through a cron, skill, or slash command).
Use Familiar with your favorite agent
Self-updating
As a skill
What people use Familiar for
- Fill the gap between AI tools: meeting transcribers, auto-memory layers, second brain
- Update Claude's skills/memory based on their workday (in a scheduled task/heartbeat)
- Typing "help me with what I'm working on right now" without having to prompt/describe what's going on their screen
- Enriching meeting transcripts with what was actually on screen (and vice versa)
- Forking it into their coaching app so coaches can see what learners did between sessions
- Someone new to tech used Familiar during a trial week at a YC startup, so that AI could coach him every few hours (and got the job)
How agents use the output
Early users often report AI using Familiar's context as "connective tissue" or a "routing layer" to help agents map between resources. Recently, my agent "saw" that I spent a long time on a document, so it fetched the full doc directly. We've also seen the agent traverse the markdown, then decide to fetch the original image (so cool).
The Bitter Lesson comes to our screens
We stand on the shoulders of giants: screenpipe, rewind, dayflow, etc. Since then: 1) Local agents got good at handling massive amounts of messy text files 2) Local agents have their own memory and skills systems.
Familiar is our "bitter lesson" version: just hand over context and get out of the way. The right way to do that piece is open source / free / offline.
Privacy
Familiar uses Apple's native OCR, deletes screenshot images after 48 hours, and redacts passwords/credit card numbers/SSNs/API tokens/etc. We'd love contributions on what else to block: https://github.com/familiar-software/familiar/tree/main/src/ or in general ways to improve privacy.
Additional Details
- Settings:
~/.familiar/settings.json - Captured still images:
<contextFolderPath>/familiar/stills/ - Extracted markdown for captured still images:
<contextFolderPath>/familiar/stills-markdown/ - Clipboard text mirrors while recording:
<contextFolderPath>/familiar/stills-markdown/<sessionId>/<timestamp>.clipboard.txt - Before still markdown and clipboard text are written, Familiar runs
rg-based redaction for password/API-key patterns. If the scanner fails twice, Familiar still saves the file and shows a one-time warning toast per recording session.
Build locally
git clone https://github.com/familiar-software/familiar.git
cd familiar
npm install
npm run dist:macnpm run dist:mac* includes npm run build:rg-bundle, which prepares scripts/bin/rg/* and packages it into Electron resources at resources/rg/.
build-rg-bundle.sh downloads official ripgrep binaries when missing (or copies from FAMILIAR_RG_DARWIN_ARM64_SOURCE / FAMILIAR_RG_DARWIN_X64_SOURCE if provided). The binaries are generated locally and are not committed.