yap

Yap is a tool your AI agent uses to help you communicate.

Some ideas are faster to show than to write: a bug you can see, a product you want to demo, an update for your team, a story for your podcast. With Yap you just talk and show. Record your screen or camera, or drop in any video, and say it however it comes out. Your agent turns it into what you meant.

Screen recording, transcripts, video editing and audio cleanup all serve that one job: getting your ideas across clearly. Yap gives Claude Code, Codex, or any agent harness the eyes, ears and hands to work with video. Your agent decides what makes your point land.

Just yap. Your agent makes it a great video.

Get started → Your agent can install it for you.

Communication in both directions

Show your agent. Instead of typing three paragraphs about a bug or a design, record it and talk. Your agent sees what was on screen at the exact moment you said "this", hears what you meant, and acts on it.

Get your point across. When the audience is people, your agent turns your rough take into something worth their time: cut to the point, captioned, cleaned up and in the right format for where it's going.

What people make with it

• Messages for coworkers. Async updates, walkthroughs and code-review narrations that come back tight, with chapters, a summary and captions.
• Bug reports and feedback for your agent. "Watch me do this" becomes instructions your agent can follow.
• Launch and demo videos. One take of you showing the product becomes a polished demo, cut per audience or per platform.
• Podcasts and talks. Clean audio, consistent loudness, highlight clips with captions, and transcripts your agent can turn into show notes or a post.
• You, at your best. Rehearse a pitch and get evidence on pacing and filler words, keep your best take, or fix a misspoken word in your own voice.

The full picture, including what's possible today and what isn't yet, is in positioning.

How it works

1. Yap. Record from the menu bar (screen, microphone, system audio and an optional camera), let your agent start a recording, or hand it a video you already have.
2. Ask your agent in plain words, for example "Cut this into a tight 60-second demo with captions" or "Here's the bug, fix it." Attach a reference video if you have a style in mind.
3. Your agent makes it clear. It reads the transcript, looks at the frames and listens to the audio to understand what you said. Then it acts on it, or cuts around the stumbles, adds what you asked for, reviews the result and exports the final video.

Don't like a choice? Say so in one more sentence. Every edit is a revision you can undo.

Things you can ask for

"Watch this recording of the checkout bug and fix it."

"Tighten this into a 60-second product demo. Cut the dead air and false starts."

"Make a vertical version for X with big, punchy captions."

"Here's a launch video I love. Match its pacing and caption style."

"I said 'version three' at 0:42 but meant 'version two'. Fix it in my voice."

"Zoom in when I open the settings panel, fade out at the end, export 1080p."

"Clean up the background hum and give me an M4A of just the narration."

"I practised my pitch on camera. How's my pacing, and where did I ramble?"

"Turn yesterday's podcast episode into three captioned clips and show notes."

"Make a two-minute update for my team from this recording, with a summary."

What your agent gets

Every capability is there to help the message land. Yap itself makes zero editorial decisions and has no built-in agent; your agent makes them all. Yap hands it evidence about what you said and showed, plus precise operations, so the result follows your intent instead of a built-in house style.

Everything runs on your Mac. Recordings, transcripts and voice models stay local.

Your originals are never touched

Edits are non-destructive. The agent works on revisions of a project, and the source recording stays byte-for-byte as you captured it. Any revision can be previewed, compared, undone or restored, so letting an agent edit carries no risk.

Get started

Requires Apple Silicon and macOS 26 or newer.

The zero-effort route is to let your agent install it. Open Claude Code or Codex and say:

Install Yap (the Mac app, which sets up the yap CLI and skill) by following https://justyap.io/llms.txt

Then record something and ask for the video you want.

Your agent installs the app; the app installs the rest. The agent setup below is what it follows.

Agent setup

These steps are written for the agent doing the install, so they're precise. Linux containers can exercise the portable CLI contracts but cannot run the native app or capture macOS media.

1. Install the app from the latest release

Use the latest stable GitHub release, not a source build. Download its SHA256SUMS, release.json and the ZIP that SHA256SUMS names (Yap-macos-arm64.zip) together, and run shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS before extracting. Check the receipt's architecture, minimum macOS version and signing status.

Extract with ditto -x -k <zip-path> <new-directory>. If Yap.app is already in /Applications or ~/Applications, quit it and replace that copy; otherwise install at ~/Applications/Yap.app. The app runs only from one of those two folders. Node is bundled; consumers do not need Bun, Node or Swift. Opening Yap at macOS login is opt-in: the installing agent asks the user, then uses yap login.setEnabled only after an explicit yes.

The skill's installation procedure holds the executable commands. Releases are not notarized: a download made with curl is never blocked, while a browser download needs Open Anyway in System Settings → Privacy & Security. Never remove quarantine attributes. Installation does not grant capture permissions.

2. Open the app; it installs the rest

open ~/Applications/Yap.app (or the copy you replaced). With Set up my agents on (the default), the app installs and keeps current, at every launch including the relaunch after an update:

• the yap command at ~/.local/bin/yap, plus a marked PATH line in the login shell profile when no startup file already puts ~/.local/bin on PATH;
• the consumer skill for every agent harness it finds, replacing any global skill named yap with the copy bundled in the app.

Don't copy a launcher or run npx skills add yourself. If cli.status or skill.status reports a problem, the installation procedure and the skill lifecycle hold the manual fallback. Start a fresh agent session so the skill is discovered ($yap for Codex, /yap for Claude).

3. Verify before operating

~/.local/bin/yap cli.status
~/.local/bin/yap skill.status
~/.local/bin/yap capture.status --help
~/.local/bin/yap service.health

Use the full path in the session that installed Yap; the PATH line reaches only new login shells.

Operation help returns its schema without launching the app. service.health checks the installed runtime and may launch the app's local service; it does not start recording. Save yap --help to a file when discovering operation names, then request help for only the operation you need. Parse each operation's JSON envelope, including failures; a successful request can still describe pending or failed background work. Follow the skill for pinned revisions, retry identities and verification of delivered media. Report the result to the user as a short checklist: release tag, app location, command, skill and service health.

Releases

Download the app from GitHub Releases. The release notes describe release limitations and link to agent setup. Built binaries are release assets; source contr