Wingman

It's the Copilot key. It's actually yours now.

Wingman is a native Windows 11 tray app that lives behind the Copilot key. Press it, Wingman looks at your screen and hands back one thing: a verdict, a draft, a filled form, an answer. One press, one action, one card. There is no chat window, no conversation, no follow-up question: if you want a back and forth, ChatGPT and Ollama's own app already do that well.

One press on the problem above, and the card in the corner says 5.94 m/s. Click it and it shows the working it used to get there. That run went to a local Ollama model, so the screenshot never left the machine.

Why not Copilot or Recall?

Sourced from docs/positioning.md; every claim below about Wingman is checked against the code in this repo, not aspirational.

	Wingman	Copilot on Windows
Footprint	A tray icon, about 2 MB, 0% CPU until you press the key. No taskbar button, no notifications, no sign-in nags	A taskbar surface, an account wall, a WebView2 app, periodic prompts
Verifiable	Offline mode refuses any non-loopback network call in code, enforced before a socket ever opens (see docs/offline.md). Open source under MIT: read the code yourself	Copilot Vision sends the screen to Microsoft's servers. Windows Recall shipped plaintext screenshots and had to be pulled twice before relaunching opt-in
Extensible	An action is a small, readable definition: a prompt, an input list and an executor. Five built-in actions ship today (check my work, add event from screen, review this email, fill this form, copy text from screen); a hand-written actions.toml entry parses and shows in the palette but does not yet dispatch on confirm (issue #242). The framework is the product, actions are the contribution surface	Closed
Never the final button	Fills, drafts and proposes. Never presses Send, Submit, Buy or Pay: a permanent rule, not a version-1 limit to be relaxed later	Copilot Actions and other "agent" products sell autonomy
Not a chatbot	One press, one action, one card, done. No conversation view, no follow-up question	Copilot is a chat pane first, everything else second
Bring your own model	OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, a local Ollama model, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (OpenRouter, Groq, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM, ...) today. No account or subscription required for the app itself	Recall and Click to Do require a 40+ TOPS NPU; the strongest models sit behind Copilot Pro

What Wingman will never be

• Never a chat window or a conversation history: one press, one action, one card.
• Never a follow-up question: the palette filters actions and takes a one-line question at most, never a thread.
• Never something you have to type into to get value: pick an action and confirm.
• Never the final button: it fills, drafts and proposes, never presses Send, Submit, Buy or Pay.

What works today

Five built-in actions, built and running, all reachable from the tray menu:

• Check my work: press the key, Wingman screenshots your active monitor, sends it to a vision model with a prompt tuned for checking a hand-worked physics or statistics problem, and shows the verdict as a small GDI card in the corner. Click the card for the full working; click anywhere else and it goes away. Read-only: it skips Confirm and Do.
• Add event from screen: screenshots, proposes a calendar entry, and on confirm writes a real .ics file via the ics connector.
• Review this email: screenshots, proposes edited text, and on confirm replaces the selected text via the replace_text executor.
• Fill this form: screenshots, proposes field values, and on confirm fills the form via the fill_form executor (with Restore last form to undo). Goes through the same Look, Propose, Confirm, Do loop as the others: App::on_preview_decided reads the card's confirmed proposal and calls confirm::confirm(...) before the executor runs.
• Copy text from screen: OCRs the active monitor and copies the text to the clipboard.

The confirm-and-execute loop, the executors (calendar add, form fill, text replace, image-to-clipboard) and the actions framework itself (actions.toml, five built-in actions loadable today) are built and wired, not planned. What has landed alongside those actions:

• Four providers plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint: OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini (cloud, your key), Ollama (local, your own machine), and any OpenAI-compatible server (OpenRouter, Groq, LM Studio, llama.cpp, vLLM, ...). See docs/providers.md for request shapes and how to add Ollama, Gemini or a compat endpoint to the fallback order today (Settings only exposes OpenAI/Anthropic so far).
• Modes: Cloud, Local, Auto (default) or Offline, from the tray's Mode submenu. Offline refuses any non-loopback network call in code; see docs/offline.md.
• Pause: 1 hour, until tomorrow, or until resumed, from the tray's Pause submenu. While paused the hotkey passes through untouched, no capture runs, no request can start.
• Keys in Windows Credential Manager, not in config.toml: a saved key never touches disk in plaintext. See docs/providers.md.
• Retry with backoff: a transport error or a 5xx retries automatically; a 429 retries once against the server's own retry-after, or shows a card naming the delay.

Where it's going

The expansion plan is the detailed roadmap; the short version is that every action follows the same four-step loop:

   LOOK          PROPOSE              CONFIRM            DO
 screenshot ──▶ model returns a ──▶ preview card, ──▶ executor runs it,
 selection      typed proposal      Enter / Esc        result card
 clipboard      (calendar entry,    (edit fields)      (undo where
 context        form values, ...)                       possible)

Read-only actions (like Check my work) skip Confirm and Do and just show the card. Anything that would write to your screen or a connected service always waits for your Enter or click first, and Wingman never presses these four buttons for you:

Send. Submit. Buy. Pay.

It fills, drafts and proposes; you finish. That rule is permanent, not a version-1 limitation to be relaxed later.

Planned and not yet built: dispatch for an arbitrary hand-written actions.toml entry beyond the five built-in ids (issue #242), more connectors beyond ics, and awareness. The actions-as-data framework, the confirm-and-execute loop, the built executors and the ics connector are built; see "What works today" above. Track what remains in GitHub Issues.

Install

.\install.ps1

Builds it, puts the .exe in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Wingman, registers it with Windows, and switches on start-with-Windows. Re-run it to upgrade in place. One UAC prompt the first time, to trust the certificate it signs with; none after that.

Registering is what puts the app in Start ▸ All apps, in Settings ▸ Apps ▸ Installed apps, and in the Copilot key picker described below. Windows lists only packaged, signed apps in that picker, which is the whole reason the install does more than copy a file.

-SkipBuild uses the existing target\release\wingman.exe instead of running cargo; -NoAutostart installs without the login entry.

Nothing in install, upgrade or uninstall reads, writes or deletes your config.toml, so your keys and prompt survive all three.

Or don't install it

cargo build --release
# target\release\wingman.exe

The .exe is standalone and runs from anywhere with no runtime dependency. You lose the app lists and the Copilot key picker, and start-with-Windows only if you tick it yourself in Settings.

First run

Launch it. A tray icon appears and %APPDATA%\Wingman\config.toml is created. Left-click the tray icon to open Settings, and paste your key into OpenAI API key or Anthropic API key, both in the Providers group at the top. Everything else lives there too: model, effort, capture size, card timeout, text size and the prompt. A saved key moves into Windows Credential Manager, not the file; Settings shows only its last four characters afterward.

Settings exposes OpenAI and Anthropic today; Gemini and Ollama both work but need one hand-edit of config.toml to enable, since the fixed-layout Settings dialog does not have a field group for either yet. See docs/providers.md for the exact steps and the limitation to know about (a Settings save can discard the hand-edit).

Local (Ollama) and Offline are both real options now, via the tray's Mode submenu: Cloud, Local, Auto (default: local first if Ollama is up, otherwise cloud) or Offline (loopback only, enforced in code). See docs/offline.md for exactly what each mode does.

The config file is still there (Open config.toml in the tray menu) if you want to edit it by hand.

OPENAI_API_KEY / ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / GEMINI_API_KEY in the environment override the file, so you can keep keys out of the config entirely if you prefer.

Configure one cloud provider or several. With more than one set, the rest are the automatic fallback in providers.order when the first fails: a provider with an empty key is skipped, not treated as an error.

Switch models from the tray at any time; the choice is written straight back to the config. To offer a model that isn't listed, add it to models under the relevant provider; no rebuild needed.

Hotkeys

Two bindings, both live at once:

	default	notes
primary	the Copilot key	Windows emits it as Win+Shift+F23
secondary	Ctrl+Shift+/	works on any keyboard

If the Copilot key does nothing, use Set Copilot key... in the tray menu and press it once: whatever your firmware actually emits gets captured and saved. Same for the secondary binding.

A third, optional chord toggles Pause: running -> paused until resumed; paused, for any reason -> resume. Unlike primary/secondary it has no default binding and no tray "Set..." entry yet, so set it by hand in config.toml:

[hotkeys.pause]
vk = 0x13    # VK_PAUSE
ctrl = false
shift = false
alt = false
win = false

then Reload settings (or restart) to pick it up. It is the one chord that still works while paused.

Through Windows Settings instead

Once installed, Wingman can also be made the Copilot key's target the official way:

Settings ▸ Bluetooth & devices ▸ Keyboard ▸ Customize Copilot key on keyboard ▸ Custom ▸ Wingman

You have to click that yourself. Windows protects the setting so no app can make itself the target, which is the right call, and means an installer cannot do it for you however much it would like to.

Both routes work at once and do the same thing. The difference is that this one is Windows launching the app, so it works regardless of what the keyboard hook sees; the hook is still what serves the secondary binding.

One gap worth knowing: if Wingman is not already running, a key press starts it and stops there rather than asking. That is deliberate: the same bare launch is what runs at login, and asking on it would mean a billed API call every boot. With start-with-Windows on it is always running anyway.

Tray menu

• Ask now: trigger without the hotkey
• Settings...: the settings window (left-clicking the tray icon opens this too)
• Copy last answer: headline and working to the clipboard
• Provider ▸: which service answers (ChatGPT or Claude)
• ChatGPT model ▸ / Claude model ▸: switch models, saved immediately
• Mode ▸: Cloud / Local / Auto / Offline, radio-checked
• Pause ▸: 1 hour / until tomorrow / until resumed; shown as Resume instead while already paused
• Set Copilot key... / Set secondary key...: rebind by pressing the key
• Edit settings: opens config.toml
• Reload settings: re-read the file without restarting
• Quit

Settings worth knowing

key	default	what it does
mode	"auto"	cloud / local / auto / offline; see docs/offline.md
capture.max_edge	1568	long-edge downscale before upload; lower cuts cost
capture.monitor	"active"	"active" follows the focused window; "primary" pins it
providers.order	["openai", "anthropic"]	fallback order; add "ollama"/"gemini" by hand, see docs/providers.md
providers.*.effort	"low"	reasoning depth; raise for harder problems
providers.ollama.base_url	"http://127.0.0.1:11434"	never localhost, see docs/providers.md
ui.card_seconds	12	auto-dismiss for the collapsed card; 0 = never
ui.text_scale	1.0	multiplies the card's font size; lower is smaller
providers.*.models	see file	what the tray's model submenu offers (Ollama has no list; it uses providers.ollama.model directly)
ui.prompt	see file	the system prompt, edit it to change what it checks
hotkeys.pause	unset (absent from the file)	optional third chord: toggles Pause until resumed / Resume; no default, no tray learn button yet, see Hotkeys

Roughly 1-2 cents and 3-8 seconds per check at the defaults.

Start with Windows

install.ps1 turns this on for you. Otherwise, tick Start with Windows in Settings; same entry, same effect. It writes a per-user entry to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, no admin prompt, and it shows up in Task Manager's Startup tab like any other startup app. Untick to remove it.

The checkbox reads the registry when Settings opens, so it always reflects reality rather than a mirrored setting that can drift. If you move or rebuild the exe somewhere else, the entry is repaired to the new path on next launch.

Only one instance

Launching it again while it is already running does not start a second copy: the new process hands over to the running one, which opens its Settings window, then exits. Without that, two instances mean two tray icons, two keyboard hooks and two billed API calls per keypress, with nothing in the UI to hint at it.

If you kill it with Task Manager rather than Quit, the tray icon can linger as a ghost until you mouse over it: the process never got to remove it.

Uninstall

.\uninstall.ps1

Stops it, unregisters the package, clears the autostart entry, hands the Copilot key back to Search if it was pointed here, deletes %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Wingman, and removes the signing certificate from both stores. One UAC prompt, for that last part; -KeepCertificate skips it, which is what you want if you are about to reinstall. It also cleans up a pre-rename copilot-ask install left over from before the 2026-09-16 rename, if one is still on the machine.

Since it is a registered app you can also use Settings ▸ Apps ▸ Installed apps ▸ Wingman ▸ Uninstall. That removes the package but leaves the autostart entry, the certificate and the installed folder behind, so the script is the tidier route.

Either way your config is left alone, deliberately: it holds your API keys and your prompt, and throwing those away is your call:

Remove-Item "$env:APPDATA\Wingman" -Recurse -Force

Rotate any API key that was in it; deleting the file does not invalidate it.

Then delete the project folder. Nothing else is written anywhere: no Program Files, no services, no scheduled tasks, no shell extensions.

Promises

What Wingman commits to, and how each promise is enforced or verifiable today: PROMISES.md.

Privacy and security

What leaves the machine, when, and how to wipe local state is in PRIVACY.md. To report a security issue, see SECURITY.md.

How Wingman is built

Wingman is built by me with Claude Code as a coding assistant. I decide what gets built, review every change, and read every message before it's posted. If something reads wrong, that's on me, and I'd like to hear about it.

Contributing

Wingman is meant to grow by community-contributed actions: a prompt, an input list and (usually) an existing executor. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the "add an action" walkthrough, and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for how we expect people to treat each other here.

Design

Architecture, request shapes and the Win32 details of what is built today are in docs/superpowers/specs/2026-09-14-copilot-ask-design.md. Packaging and install internals are in the packaging spec. What comes next, in full, is the expansion plan. Per-provider request shapes, keys and retry behaviour are in docs/providers.md; the four modes and the Offline guard are in docs/offline.md.

License

MIT, see LICENSE. Third-party dependencies and their licenses are listed in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.