Introduction

Xenocept is a desktop screen capture and annotation tool, built for the AI era.

The pitch is simple: stop describing what’s on your screen and start showing it — to your AI agent, your QA tracker, your support tool, your teammates, or any workflow you can configure.

What Xenocept Does

You press a global hotkey. Your screen freezes. An annotation overlay drops in. You click-drag to mark regions of interest, draw on them, attach written descriptions, and stack as many comments as you need. When you’re done, you hit Submit and Xenocept bundles everything — pixels, markup, descriptions, metadata — into a structured snapshot and delivers it to whatever consumer you’ve configured.

It’s the missing tool between “I see a problem” and “the right system has the context to act on it.”

What Makes It Different

• Snappy. The Tauri overlay window is created at startup and kept hidden; pressing the hotkey captures a fresh screenshot and unhides the existing window.
• Pluggable delivery. Submitted sessions are dispatched to destinations you configure — each destination wraps a plugin that knows how to ship the data (an HTTP endpoint, an MCP channel, a file, an email, your own JavaScript). See Consumers & Delivery.
• Local-first. Every submitted session is persisted in an AeorDB-backed store on your machine. Browseable, searchable, yours. Delivery to anywhere else is a side effect.
• Native screen capture. Through the xcap crate — pixel-buffer captures on whichever native API your platform exposes (PipeWire/X11 on Linux, the equivalent on macOS/Windows).
• No frameworks, no build step. Tauri shell, Rust backend, vanilla WebComponents on the frontend. A binary you can audit.

Who It’s For

• Developers working with AI agents — Drive Claude, Codex, or any MCP-compatible agent with visual context, not just words.
• QA engineers and bug reporters — Stop losing context to flat screenshots. Every report carries the annotation and description as a single payload.
• Customer support — Walk through issues with screen-share sessions and deliver structured, redacted reports into your help-desk pipeline.
• Designers and reviewers — Comments stay anchored to the regions they describe. Reviewers see exactly which pixel a note refers to.
• Tool builders — Wire snapshots into anything via the stable JSON schema and the plugin system.

Reading This Documentation

The docs are organized for two kinds of readers:

• If you just want to use Xenocept, start with Getting Started, then skim Core Concepts and Capture & Annotation.
• If you’re integrating Xenocept into a workflow or building a plugin, jump to Consumers & Delivery and Plugins.
• If you want to understand the why and how under the hood, the AeorDB Integration and Core Concepts sections explain the architectural decisions.

Status

Xenocept is under active development. The desktop binary, capture pipeline, annotation overlay, comment workflow, and AeorDB-backed storage are all in place. Pluggable delivery and the plugin system are landing in stages. Where this documentation describes behavior that’s still in flux, you’ll see a note saying so.

The vision document lives in the bot-docs/docs/vision.md file inside the repository — it’s the master plan and is updated as the project evolves.