ghost-os

Your AI agent can write code, run tests, search files. But it can't click a button, send an email, or fill out a form. It lives inside a chat box.

Ghost OS changes that. One install, and any AI agent can see and operate every app on your Mac.

Meet Specter

Ghost OS gives AI agents eyes and hands. Shadow gives them memory. Specter gives them a home.

Deploy persistent AI agents to dedicated VMs in 90 seconds. Automatic DNS, TLS, systemd hardening. Interactive TUI dashboard. You own the infrastructure.

AI agents that earn your trust.

Meet Shadow

Shadow is the other half of the story. Ghost OS gives AI agents eyes and hands on your Mac. Shadow gives them memory and intelligence.

14-modality capture. Proactive suggestions. Episode generation. On-device LLM inference. Computer-use training data. All local, all open source.

Your computer was paying attention the whole time.

What's New  

Self-learning recipes. Show Ghost OS how to do something once, and it remembers forever.

• ghost_learn_start -- Begin watching the user perform a task
• ghost_learn_stop -- Stop and return the enriched action sequence
• ghost_learn_status -- Check recording progress

The user performs the task manually (clicking, typing, switching apps). Ghost OS observes every action through a CGEvent tap enriched with accessibility tree context. Claude synthesizes the raw observation into a parameterized, replayable recipe.

No screenshots needed. No vision model. Just the accessibility tree and your keyboard/mouse.

User:    "Watch me send an email."
Agent:   ghost_learn_start task_description:"send email in Gmail"
         ...user performs the task...
Agent:   ghost_learn_stop
         -> 8 actions with full AX context
         -> Synthesizes recipe with 3 parameters: recipient, subject, body
         -> ghost_recipe_save
User:    "Send an email to bob about the Q4 report"
Agent:   ghost_run recipe:"gmail-send-learned" params:{...}

Requires Input Monitoring permission (System Settings > Privacy & Security > Input Monitoring). Run ghost setup to configure.

4 new tools. ghost_annotate, ghost_hover, ghost_long_press, ghost_drag. Pinned vision sidecar dependencies, fixed vision model download, Chinese/CJK input support (thanks @junshi5218).

Thank you to the 500+ people who have starred this project. You are why we keep building. If you want to contribute directly, we would love that. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

You:     "Send an email to sarah@company.com about the Q4 report"
Agent:   ghost_run recipe:"gmail-send" params:{recipient, subject, body}
         → Compose opens, fields fill, email sends. Done.

Setup

Recipes in Action

Send emails and download papers. Any app. Any workflow.

Beyond the Browser

Slack messages, Finder folders — Ghost OS operates native macOS apps, not just browsers.

Why Ghost OS?

Other computer-use tools take screenshots and guess what's on screen. Ghost OS reads the macOS accessibility tree — structured, labeled data about every element in every app. When the AX tree isn't enough (web apps, dynamic content), it falls back to a local vision model (ShowUI-2B) for visual grounding.

And when it figures out a workflow, it saves it. Other tools repeat the same expensive reasoning every time.

• Self-learning — A frontier model figures out the workflow once. A small model runs it forever.
• Transparent — Recipes are JSON. Read every step before running. No black box.
• Native — Accessibility tree first. Vision fallback when needed. Structured data over pixel guessing.
• Any app — Not just browsers. Slack, Finder, Messages — anything on your Mac.
• Local — Your data never leaves your machine.
• Open — MCP protocol. Works with Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, or any MCP client.

Install

brew install ghostwright/ghost-os/ghost-os
ghost setup

That's it. ghost setup handles permissions, MCP configuration, recipe installation, and vision model setup.

Homebrew has a known issue on macOS developer betas where it demands an Xcode version that doesn't exist yet. If brew install fails, install directly:

curl -sL https://github.com/ghostwright/ghost-os/releases/latest/download/ghost-os-2.2.1-macos-arm64.tar.gz | tar xz
sudo cp ghost /opt/homebrew/bin/
sudo cp ghost-vision /opt/homebrew/bin/
sudo mkdir -p /opt/homebrew/share/ghost-os
sudo cp GHOST-MCP.md /opt/homebrew/share/ghost-os/
sudo cp -r recipes /opt/homebrew/share/ghost-os/
sudo cp -r vision-sidecar /opt/homebrew/share/ghost-os/
ghost setup

How It Works

Ghost OS connects to your AI agent through MCP and gives it 29 tools to see and operate your Mac. It reads the macOS accessibility tree for structured data about every app. For web apps where the AX tree falls short (Gmail, Slack), a local vision model (ShowUI-2B) finds elements visually. Click, type, hover, drag, scroll, press keys, manage windows. Any app, not just browsers.

You:     "Download the latest paper on chain-of-thought prompting from arXiv"
Agent:   ghost_run recipe:"arxiv-download" params:{query:"chain of thought prompting"}
         → Navigates to arXiv, searches, opens PDF, downloads to Desktop. Done.

Works with Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, or anything that speaks MCP.

Recipes

When your agent figures out a workflow, it saves it as a recipe. A recipe is a JSON file with steps, parameters, and wait conditions. Transparent and auditable.

A frontier model figures out the workflow once. A small model runs it forever.

# One command sends an email
ghost_run recipe:"gmail-send" params:{"recipient":"hello@example.com","subject":"Hello","body":"World"}

# 7 steps, 30 seconds, 100% reliable

• Recipes are just JSON. Read every step before running.
• Share with your team. One person learns the workflow, everyone benefits.
• Chain recipes together. The agent knows when to call what.
• Write once with Claude or GPT-4. Run forever with Haiku.

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