overlay

A click-through drawing layer that floats over other windows and can show boxes, arrows, highlights, spotlights, labels, and callouts. Both a person and coding agents can add marks.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to point out interface elements, highlight a problem on screen, dim unrelated areas, or inspect and manage current annotations.
Why use it?
It makes areas of the screen visible for discussion without changing the underlying application, and marks can expire or be cleared by agent.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/esaruoho/apple/overlay
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/esaruoho/apple
Per session 106 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 498 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00106 $0.00498
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00249
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00100
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00050

Measured 2d ago against content hash 3b276d0a4329, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

overlay scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

commands/overlay.md · 34 lines

What it actually says

Run the apple-skill overlay helper on $ARGUMENTS.

Use Bash to execute (one call, then stop):

/Users/esaruoho/work/apple/bin/overlay $ARGUMENTS

Modes:

  • /overlay — status: running? how many marks, by which actor?
  • /overlay open — launch Overlay.app (menu-bar only; ⌃⌥⌘D draws, esc leaves)
  • /overlay kinds — the object vocabulary an agent can post
  • /overlay post box --rel 0.1,0.2,0.3,0.1 --actor agent:fm --ttl ephemeral
  • /overlay post callout --rel 0.5,0.5,0.1,0.1 --text "this is the stuck process"
  • /overlay post spotlight --rel 0.3,0.3,0.4,0.3 — dim everything else
  • /overlay post --stdin — read one object, or an array, as JSON
  • /overlay clear --actor agent:fm — remove one agent's marks, leave the human's ink
  • /overlay dump --json — the marks currently mirrored to disk

--rel is 0…1 of the screen (preferred: an agent needs to know nothing about pixel sizes); --rect X,Y,W,H and --at X,Y take absolute AppKit coordinates, origin bottom-left. Posted objects default to ttl: session so an agent cannot litter the desktop permanently.

Posting never enters draw mode — the overlay stays click-through while marks are up.

After the command completes, report only the lines it printed. Do not summarize.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 34 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 3b276d0a4329

Subscribe to this mod's changes

overlay is a command published in the GitHub repository esaruoho/apple (11 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 106 tokens to every session and 498 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.