Visual recall, and the exception we argued about

ShogunAI reads text, not pixels. That rule is the reason people trust the memory layer, and we have turned down features to keep it.

Then we hit the case where it costs you something real.

Where text runs out

Most of what you look at is text underneath, and the accessibility layer hands it over cleanly. Some things are not. A chart in a slide someone screen-shared. A dashboard drawn on a canvas. A design mock. A PDF that is really a scan. An app that ships no accessibility information at all.

For those, ShogunAI knows a window existed and knows nothing about what was in it. You ask what the revenue chart showed in Monday's review and get silence — not a wrong answer, but not an answer either.

We could have shrugged. Instead we wrote an exception, and then spent longer writing the rules around the exception than building the feature.

Visual recall, precisely

Visual recall is off by default. Turning it on takes an explicit choice in settings, and the setting says exactly what follows.

With it on, when text extraction comes back empty for the window you are working in, ShogunAI takes a compressed frame, reads the text out of it, and stores the frame in the encrypted database for a finite duration you choose. Settings offers one through seven days plus a bounded custom duration. Three days remains the default for existing installs. At the selected age, the frame is deleted automatically whether or not you ever opened it.

The extracted text stays in memory the same way any other text does. The image does not. That is the whole point: the frame exists so a bad extraction is recoverable for the period you deliberately selected, not forever.

The remaining rules:

• Nothing is uploaded. Frames are read on your Mac and never leave it.
• Only where text failed. A window that yields clean text never produces a frame, which is the overwhelming majority of your day.
• Audio is not included. This exception is about pixels only. ShogunAI does not write audio to disk, with or without visual recall.
• A local, finite timeline. You can inspect or delete saved screens during their retention window. There is no cloud copy or permanent recording.
• Off means off. With the setting disabled, no image is written at any point in the pipeline.

Why retention is a choice

Different work needs different windows. A day may be enough for routine recall; a week covers a full project cycle; a bounded custom duration supports longer work without pretending storage is free. Settings shows current encrypted storage and projects the selected period from recent capture volume. Automatic age deletion is always enabled. If the encrypted frame store reaches its safety ceiling, new capture pauses instead of silently deleting retained frames early.

The honest framing

This is a documented exception to a rule we would rather have kept absolute, and we are describing it that way on purpose. Products that hold a hard line in public usually hold a softer one in the code; the ones worth trusting are the ones that tell you where the line actually is and what it costs.

Here it is: default off, opt-in, local only, images only where text failed, and automatic deletion at the finite age you selected. If that trade is not one you want, leave it off — everything else in ShogunAI works exactly as before.