Enable AI programming assistant to directly control the desktop: Zig's native CLI tool usecomputer is now open source, compatible with Claude Code and Codex.

According to 1M AI News monitoring, open-source developer Tommaso De Rossi has released a desktop automation command-line tool called usecomputer. It is written in Zig as a native binary that does not rely on the Node.js runtime, enabling AI programming assistants (such as Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, etc.) to directly control the desktop's mouse, keyboard, and screenshots. It supports macOS and Linux (X11, Wayland via XWayland compatibility).

usecomputer provides CLI commands for screenshot capture, mouse movement/clicking/dragging/scrolling, keyboard input, and synthesizing shortcuts. It includes a coordinate mapping system (coord-map) that automatically converts pixel coordinates from a screenshot to actual screen coordinates. By default, the screenshot output scales the longest edge to 1568 pixels to fit the model's context window. The tool also supports the Kitty Graphics Protocol, allowing screenshots to be embedded directly into the model's context after setting environment variables, eliminating the need to read files separately.

Prior to this, De Rossi developed the browser automation tool Playwriter (with 3200+ GitHub stars), and usecomputer extends this automation from the browser to the desktop. The project has been spun out from his kimaki monorepo, offering both CLI and Node.js library usage. The README contains a full integration example for OpenAI's computer tool and Anthropic's computer use.