offstage-qa

A background testing workflow for native macOS apps. It operates through macOS accessibility controls while the app stays out of the foreground, then checks the app's actual state rather than relying only on screenshots.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to exercise, QA, or regression-test a macOS app, including launching it, pressing accessible controls, checking persistence, and comparing results with expected behavior.
Why use it?
It allows an app to be tested while the user continues working on the Mac and avoids sending simulated input to the foreground app.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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 skills/thesepehrm/offstage/offstage-qa
Any agent
npx skills add thesepehrm/offstage --skill offstage-qa
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/thesepehrm/offstage

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 94 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,278 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 $0.00094 $0.01278
Opus 5 $0.00047 $0.00639
Sonnet 5 $0.00019 $0.00256
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00128

Measured 2d ago against content hash a5ace7a92d19, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

offstage-qa 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.

src/offstage/skill/offstage-qa/SKILL.md · 112 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 112 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

QA a macOS app with offstage

offstage drives a macOS app in the background: the app never becomes frontmost, and no synthetic input ever reaches the user's foreground. You perceive through the accessibility tree, act through AXPress and a semantic port, and verify against ground truth, not screenshots.

Prerequisites (check once per session)

offstage doctor

If offstage is not installed: pip install offstage (or pip install -e '.[dev]' inside the harness repo). Doctor failing on a locked screen or missing Accessibility or Screen Recording permission is a user action: report it and stop; there is no programmatic workaround.

The app under test needs a manifest (JSON describing bundle id, app path, socket, goldens). Look for *.manifest.json in the repo; if none exists, create one from the reference in the harness docs (docs/manifest.md) and validate it:

offstage validate <app>.manifest.json

The verbs

offstage start <manifest>          # launch fresh (full state reset)
offstage restart <manifest>        # relaunch WITHOUT reset (persistence check)
offstage stop <manifest>
offstage press <manifest> <ax-identifier>
offstage menu <manifest> <menu-title> <item-title>
offstage port <manifest> '<json>'  # semantic action; app-specific commands
offstage observe <manifest>        # compact JSON: AX rows, defaults, port state, a11y counts
offstage golden check <manifest>   # canonical-state pixel diff (resets app state!)
offstage golden bake <manifest>    # rewrite goldens (only when a visual change is intended)
offstage batch <manifest> <steps>  # a whole step list in one call (see below)

Run journeys with batch, not verb-by-verb

One CLI call costs you a turn, so a ten-step journey costs ten. batch runs the list in one process and returns one JSON result. Steps are the same verbs plus expect <json-pointer> <expected-json>, which asserts against ground truth and makes the batch self-judging.

offstage batch app.manifest.json '[
  ["start"],
  ["press","addNote"],
  ["expect","/defaults/notes.v1/0/title","\"Untitled\""],
  ["port","{\"cmd\":\"rename\",\"index\":0,\"title\":\"TOP\"}"],
  ["expect","/port/titles","[\"TOP\"]"]]'

Read the full file on GitHub · 112 lines

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 · 112 lines · 94 tokens per session scan A a5ace7a92d19

Subscribe to this mod's changes

offstage-qa is a skill published in the GitHub repository thesepehrm/offstage (5 stars, last pushed 15d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 94 tokens to every session and 1,278 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 2026-08-31.

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