All 16 Dependencies
Every package understudy depends on, ranked by repo health score.
Understudy is a local-first, open-source AI agent runtime for macOS that gives you a single instruction-driven interface for controlling every surface of your computer. Rather than forcing you to live inside a web app or a proprietary SaaS product, Understudy runs on your machine and dispatches tasks through GUI automation, managed Playwright browser sessions, a bash shell, semantic web search, and eight built-in messaging channel adapters — all from the same agent loop.
What distinguishes Understudy from comparable projects is its teach-by-demonstration pipeline. You show it a task once, and the system extracts the intent rather than the pixel coordinates, producing a generalized skill that survives UI redesigns, window resizing, and application switches. That skill can subsequently be invoked with plain natural language and will automatically upgrade deterministic steps (file downloads, browser navigation) to faster execution routes while keeping genuinely complex steps agentic.
For longer pipelines, Understudy introduces a three-artifact composition model: Skills are agentic sub-tasks that make their own decisions within quality gates; Workers are deterministic scripted subtasks that follow a fixed sequence and emit structured output; and Playbooks orchestrate workers and skills as independent child sessions, each with their own context window. This lets a single pipeline sequence both scripted reliability and genuine autonomy without colliding context windows.
Understudy is model-agnostic by design. It ships with adapters for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and other providers, and requires only your own API keys — no subscription, no data sent to a vendor-managed cloud, no vendor lock-in. The runtime is published as an npm package and controlled from the command line.
