Ambient Context Releases Add Agent Skills, MCP, and Reliability Fixes

Summary

Ambient Context is a macOS menu bar app that records the focused window through the Accessibility API and turns each day’s record into cited knowledge files and written notes through an agent CLI. It does not take screenshots, video, or OCR, skips locked-screen capture and secure password fields, and stores plain Markdown in a user-selected folder. The first public release added per-day records, noise filtering, idle detection, replay tracking, message routing, a scheduler, notifications, a two-view browser, a 20-tool MCP server, and validation that rejects summaries whose citations or figures are absent from the captured evidence. The app runs Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or another configurable command on the user’s machine; it holds no model credentials and makes no model calls itself. Its MCP server exposes read operations directly against the capture folder, while mutating operations go through the running app over a local Unix socket with mode 0600 and are recorded in a ledger. The project documents redaction of credential-like patterns, app exclusions, password-manager and private-browsing exclusions, the network behavior of update checks, and the limits of its privacy protections. Version 1.0.1 added signed automatic updates and stable disk-image names. Version 1.1.0 added five built-in agent skills, installable from the app or with npx skills add, with safeguards against overwriting user edits. Version 1.1.1 fixed a self-capture crash caused by an AppKit call on the polling thread. The latest release, 1.1.2, validates that the login item points to the installed app, avoids creating one for builds outside an Applications folder, and writes startup panic details to panic.log. The application requires macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon and is distributed under the MIT license.