Stop describing bugs to your agent — show it the movie

What it does

Scrawl is a macOS (and Windows-preview) screen recorder built for AI coding agents. Hit a shortcut, narrate the problem while clicking around and drawing on the screen, and it produces a bundle: an annotated contact sheet of keyframes, full-resolution frames, a time-aligned transcript with an interaction timeline, and a structured scrawl.json manifest. The agent skill teaches Claude Code, OpenCode, or Codex how to consume it — read the contact sheet, open the frames your narration points at, and zoom into specific moments on demand.

The interesting bit

The bundle is designed for an agent’s context window, not a human’s video player. Instead of a 50 MB screen recording, the agent gets a compact contact sheet plus a transcript it can cross-reference — and commands like scrawl zoom --at "a phrase you said" or --mark 2 let it pull dense frames around the exact moment you mentioned. It’s a retrieval interface over your screen recording.

Key highlights

• Records screen, voice narration, and ink annotations in one pass; auto-crops to the activity
• Time-aligned transcript and interaction timeline in summary.md
• Agent commands for zooming into moments, extracting frame ranges, and exporting .mp4
• Can capture a cabled iPhone as a mirror device
• Native GPUI menu-bar app with self-updates (Sparkle) on macOS
• Runs fully offline for transcription via Apple’s SpeechAnalyzer — no speech-permission prompt needed

Caveats

• macOS build requires Apple silicon on macOS 26 or later
• Windows build is an unsigned preview that doesn’t self-update yet
• Needs several macOS permissions (Screen Recording, Microphone, Accessibility) — the onboarding handles it, but it’s a real gauntlet

Verdict

If you use Claude Code, OpenCode, or Codex and have ever typed a three-paragraph bug description you could have just pointed at, this is worth a look. If you’re not in the agent workflow, it’s a fairly heavy screen recorder with a niche output format.