Skill Recorder

Record yourself doing a task once — turn it into a skill your AI agent can repeat.

Skill Recorder captures a real work session on your screen — the clicks, the app and window switches, the pages you visit, and (if you want) your spoken narration — then uses the GitHub Copilot CLI to reconstruct what you actually did as a clear intent plus an ordered list of steps. From there, one step turns that single run into something an agent can reuse:

• a Skill — a SKILL.md procedure an agent runs on demand, or
• an Automation — the same procedure on a schedule or trigger.

Both prefer the agent's native tools (like the gh CLI or web_fetch) over replaying UI clicks, and generalize from your one example — so recording yourself submitting one form can teach the agent to submit all of them.

  

How it works

1. 🔴 Record — Hit record (or ⌘⇧R / Ctrl+Shift+R from anywhere) and just do your task. Skill Recorder captures your screen and activity locally, in the background.
2. 🎛️ Control — While recording, a small always-on-top bar shows capture and microphone state. Mute, unmute, or switch mics on the fly, then finish — or discard (with a confirmation) if the take didn't go to plan.
3. 🧠 Analyze — Click Analyze and GitHub Copilot reconstructs one overall intent and an ordered list of steps. Review and edit until it reads right.
4. ✨ Create — From an approved analysis, generate a reusable Skill and/or a scheduled Automation.

Get started

macOS / Ubuntu

commit="<40-character-release-commit>"; curl -fsSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adilei/skill-recorder/$commit/install.sh" | SKILL_RECORDER_COMMIT="$commit" bash

The release commit pins both the downloaded script and the source it builds. To keep the application running after the terminal closes, add SKILL_RECORDER_DETACHED=1 after the pipe:

commit="<40-character-release-commit>"; curl -fsSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/adilei/skill-recorder/$commit/install.sh" | SKILL_RECORDER_COMMIT="$commit" SKILL_RECORDER_DETACHED=1 bash

On macOS the installer also adds a Skill Recorder (Source) app to ~/Applications, so you can relaunch it later from Spotlight, Launchpad, or the Dock without re-running the command. On Ubuntu it adds a matching application entry.

Windows

Use the commit-pinned source installer documented in INSTALL.md. The published command must identify a full 40-character release commit. It downloads a verified portable Node.js 24 runtime, builds that exact source revision locally, preserves the required license materials, and creates Skill Recorder (Source) shortcuts on your desktop and in the Start Menu — all without installing Node system-wide. When it finishes it prints where both shortcuts were saved. Re-running the same command with the same commit reuses the installed revision instead of downloading and rebuilding it again.

Both paths install dependencies from their publishers and build Skill Recorder locally. The platform-specific Copilot CLI is installed with the application dependencies; a global CLI installation is not required. The first time you choose Analyze without stored Copilot credentials, Skill Recorder says so and offers Sign in to Copilot, which opens a terminal running the bundled CLI's login command (the same command is shown so you can run it yourself). On first launch, macOS asks for Screen Recording permission — grant it and you're ready to record.

⚠️ Keep secrets out of your recordings. Don't record, type, paste, or narrate passwords, tokens, API keys, or other confidential info — choosing Analyze sends recording data to GitHub's cloud. Skill Recorder reminds you before every recording. Details in What gets captured.

Source installer options & updating

Set any of these environment variables when you run the command:

Variable	Default	What it does
SKILL_RECORDER_COMMIT	(required)	exact 40-character source commit
SKILL_RECORDER_INSTALL_ROOT	per-user platform path	source and portable runtime location
SKILL_RECORDER_NO_LAUNCH	(unset)	set to 1 to install without launching
SKILL_RECORDER_NO_DESKTOP_SHORTCUT	(unset)	Windows: set to 1 to skip the desktop shortcut
SKILL_RECORDER_DETACHED	(unset)	macOS/Ubuntu background launch with rolling logs
SKILL_RECORDER_LOG_KEEP	5	macOS/Ubuntu detached log retention

Re-run the platform command with a new release commit to update. Inspect-first, platform-specific relaunch, and uninstall instructions are in INSTALL.md.

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The rest of this README is for people who want the details — or want to hack on the code.

Requirements

• macOS (primary target). Windows 11 x64 and ARM64 are also supported — see WINDOWS-VALIDATION.md.
• Node.js 24 for manual source development. Installers provide a private runtime when needed.
• A GitHub account with Copilot access and authentication. Dependency installation includes the platform-specific Copilot CLI used by the SDK.
• No system media tools required — Chromium handles screen snapshots and narration audio decoding. A system ffmpeg is only used to open recordings made by an older Skill Recorder version that has no snapshot manifest.

On first launch macOS prompts for Screen Recording (required). Turning on Narrate requests Microphone permission immediately so you can pick a named input before recording; that permission-check stream is released without saving any audio.

What gets captured

Recording, storage, frame extraction, and optional narration transcription all happen on your computer — nothing leaves while you record. Only when you choose Analyze does Skill Recorder send the event timeline (window/document titles, URLs, and clipboard previews), extracted screen images, narration text, and anything else you provide to GitHub's cloud service for Copilot to process.

⚠️ Please don't capture secrets. Passwords, access tokens, API keys, credentials, and other confidential information should never be recorded, typed, pasted, shown, copied, or narrated during a session.

The in-app "Records your screen and activity" panel spells out exactly what's collected:

• Window tracking — active-app / window switches (Koffi/Win32 on Windows, get-windows elsewhere).
• Browser URLs — the page you're on (macOS, via AppleScript).
• Screen video — recorded by Chromium; low-rate snapshots are captured alongside it and retained only when the screen changes or a heartbeat is due.
• Clipboard — short previews of copied text that tie steps together.
• Narration (optional) — turn on Narrate before capture or toggle the microphone from the floating recording bar. Narrate shows the active input and remembers a selected microphone, with an explicit System default fallback. During capture, the bar can switch inputs without interrupting screen recording; each microphone-on interval is timestamped on the video timeline, saved locally, and can be transcribed on-device in any of Whisper's 99 supported languages (via transformers.js), preserving the selected language. The first transcription uses an explicit, one-time ~252 MB model download. The multilingual q8 checkpoint is only about 0.6 MB larger than the previous English-only model and uses the same small architecture, so runtime memory and transcription speed are expected to remain effectively unchanged.

Install or develop from source

See INSTALL.md for the commit-pinned Windows source installer, the inspect-first alternative, manual developer setup, updates, uninstallation, and the licensing boundary between local source builds and redistributable packages.

For development after checking out an exact revision:

npm ci
npm run compliance:licenses
npm run dev

npm run dev starts Vite and launches the Electron app with hot-reload. The app also lives in the menu-bar tray; ⌘⇧R (macOS) / Ctrl+Shift+R (Windows) toggles recording from anywhere. On Windows, press F12 while the recorder or Sessions window is focused to toggle DevTools during development.

Other useful scripts:

npm run typecheck   # tsc --noEmit
npm run build       # typecheck + production build (dist/ + dist-electron/)
npm run dist        # build a compliant non-Windows distributable in release/
npm run dist:win:x64    # requires native Windows x64
npm run dist:win:arm64  # requires native Windows ARM64
npm run dist:portable:mac # compliant unsigned macOS ZIP
npm run dist:portable:win # compliant unsigned Windows x64 portable executable
npm run compliance:licenses # validate the installed dependency license inventory
npm start           # run the last build with `electron .`

Distributable builds download the exact corresponding-source archives and license materials required by bundled native libraries. They are packaged outside the ASAR under resources/compliance/; a release fails if any required notice, source archive, or relinking instruction is missing or differs from its reviewed SHA-256. Locally generated source builds must not be redistributed.

Maintainers must follow RELEASING.md when changing versions, dependencies, assets, release notes, tags, source installers, or binary downloads.

Evals

The variable part of the system — the Copilot describer and builders — has a fixture-based eval suite. See evals/README.md.

npm run eval            # score the describer against synthetic recordings
npm run eval:builder    # score the skill/automation generalization

License

MIT