Passive memory, not screenshots

The obvious way to give software a memory of your day is to record your screen. Take a frame every few seconds, run text recognition over it, store the frames, and search them later. It works, and it is the wrong trade.

A frame archive is a copy of everything you ever looked at, sitting on disk in a form any process with file access can read and any viewer can play back. It holds the password manager you opened for four seconds, the medical result in another tab, the salary spreadsheet a colleague shared. You did not decide to keep any of that. The recorder decided for you.

ShogunAI does not record your screen.

There is one documented exception, and it is not a recorder either: visual recall, which is off until you turn it on, takes a frame where a window yields no text at all and deletes it automatically at the retention age you choose. The rules around it are in Visual recall, and the exception we argued about.

What it reads instead

macOS already exposes a structured description of what is on screen — the accessibility layer that screen readers use. Window titles, headings, the body of the document you have focused, the message you are reading, the field you are typing into. It is the same interface an assistive technology uses, and it returns text and structure rather than pixels.

That is what ShogunAI reads. The result is smaller, more accurate, and more useful than anything recovered from an image:

• No recognition errors. Text arrives as text. Nothing is guessed from pixels, so nothing is silently wrong in your memory six weeks later.
• Structure survives. ShogunAI knows the difference between a document title, a message from a person, and a code comment, because the accessibility tree says which is which.
• It is cheap. Reading a text tree on focus change costs a fraction of what encoding and recognizing images costs. That is why your fans stay quiet and your battery lasts.

Capture is a decision, not a firehose

Passive does not mean indiscriminate. Capture is scoped: it follows the app and window you are actually working in, and it stops where you tell it to stop.

Private windows, password fields, and any app you exclude are never read. Pausing is one click in the notch, and while it is paused nothing enters memory. Those exclusions apply before anything is written, not as a filter over data already stored — the difference matters, because the second kind of promise breaks the moment there is a bug in the filter.

What is actually stored

Three things: the text, where it came from, and when. Every entry keeps a link back to the event that produced it, which is what lets ShogunAI answer with "you decided this on Tuesday at 14:20, in the design doc" instead of a confident sentence with no receipts.

Memory is tiered by age. The last day stays in memory for instant recall, the last month stays queryable in full detail, and everything older is compressed and kept for the long haul. You get answers about this morning at conversational speed and answers about last quarter without keeping a quarter of raw text hot.

The part people actually ask about

"Can someone else read it?" It is on your Mac, in an encrypted database. It is not synced anywhere by default. There is no server-side copy of your day for someone to subpoena, breach, or quietly train on.

"Does anything leave?" Sometimes, for named reasons — a model call to draft a reply, a service you explicitly connected. Every one of those is recorded in a traceability log you can open: what left, for what purpose, and whether it crossed a third party on the way. If we ever route your content through someone else, the log says so and the setup asks first.

"What about the things I would rather not keep?" Delete works. Removing an entry removes it from search, from the tiered store, and from the context that gets assembled for the next action.

The rule underneath all of it is simple. Your day is not a video to be filed away. It is a set of facts about what you did, and a system that knows those facts — and only those — is both more useful and much easier to trust.