ChatGPT and Claude are great. But they can't see what's on your screen. The default workflow is: take screenshot, switch to ChatGPT, paste it, ask, switch back. Doing this 30 times a day burns hours.
We shipped Crade to fix that. A Mac and Windows app that floats over your screen, captures it on demand, and pipes it to your own ChatGPT or Claude account. No screenshots, no tab switching.
This is what we learned building it.
Three flows, depending on which AI you bring:
** ChatGPT (free or paid OpenAI account)**: we OAuth into OpenAI, spawn the codex
CLI as a subprocess. Each prompt becomes:
codex -p "your prompt" --image screenshot.png
The AI usage is billed by OpenAI directly to your account.
Claude (Pro/Max account): same pattern with the claude
CLI:
claude -p "your prompt" \
--allowedTools "Read,Write,Edit,Bash,Glob,Grep,WebFetch" \
--output-format stream-json --verbose
Streaming JSON lets us show tool-use events as they happen.
Built-in tier: HTTP to our Cloudflare Worker, which proxies to OpenAI (Free) or Anthropic (Pro). For users who don't want to bring their own.
The point: in BYO mode, we never sit in the middle. The screenshot goes directly from the user's machine to OpenAI or Anthropic.
Fix: bump our window level to 1500 (kCGAssistiveTechHighWindowLevel). This is the level used by accessibility tools like VoiceOver. It's above NSScreenSaverWindowLevel, so we win.
window.setWindowLevel(1500) # kCGAssistiveTechHighWindowLevel
We re-assert it every 500ms in a periodic check because some apps fight back.
For Windows, Qt.WindowStaysOnTopHint
is enough. Browsers don't compete the same way.
This is where we make some readers angry: we picked Python + PyQt6 over Electron.
Reasoning:
claude
and codex
is trivial from PythonThe tradeoffs: PyInstaller distribution is finicky, default PyQt6 UI looks dated (real stylesheet work needed), and the talent pool for desktop Python devs is smaller than for Electron.
Worth it for our use case. Maybe not for yours.
claude
and codex
separately. Bundling them in the app made onboarding 10x smoother.Crade is at crade.ai. Free tier covers daily use. Pro ($7.99/mo) and Premium ($19.99/mo) add higher caps and Agent mode (file system + shell access for the AI).
Curious what other devs would build on this pattern. The CLI-as-subprocess approach for desktop AI tools feels under-explored.