How it works

The premise

If you record a screen continuously, a coding agent drowns in near-identical frames. If you take a screenshot on demand, you miss everything that happened in between. framewatch watches one window and saves a frame only when something meaningful happens.

It captures when the window settles down after a burst of changes, when a spinner starts or stops, and (on a throttle) when something like a counter or a log tail updates. Every frame comes with timestamped notes on why it was taken, so an agent can piece together what happened without watching a video.

What’s included

Captures when the window settles, when a loading indicator starts or stops, and when busy regions change

Timestamped metadata with every frame explaining why it was taken

Published on crates.io, with docs on docs.rs and CI

A single Rust binary with no runtime dependencies

How it’s built

framewatch is built on Rust, Windows API, ScreenCaptureKit and X11.

The repository is 100% Rust by volume.

It carries 42 commits since Jun 2026, most recently changed in Sep 2026.

How the work is done

Every project here starts as a written spec, and the spec stays the source of truth once there’s code. The repository keeps a build plan with current status, an append-only decision log of where the code departed from the plan, and a handoff document that describes where things stand, including the unfinished parts.

That’s how one person keeps this many projects moving, and it’s what this page is written from.

Current state

Shipping. Released and usable today.

The source is public, so you can check anything on this page against it.