Blinkling

Blinkling puts Blink, a small green companion, in the corner of your desktop, above every app. Hold Ctrl (Control on a Mac) and click a paragraph, a button or a picture — or drag to take an area — and the pick flies into Blink, where a chat card opens beside it and the answer streams in from your own signed-in Claude Code. Guide mode marks the parts of a hard page step by step, and an optional auto-explain bubble gives one or two sentences in your language without opening the card.

The desktop app is an Electron shell that draws Blink and does the looking; Claude Code, signed in on the same computer, does the answering, through one session that runs the signed-in claude command without a shell and reads the answer as a stream of events. A small local bridge (bin/blinkling.cjs) is also an MCP server for Claude Code, so Claude Code can look at the screen when asked. An optional Chrome or Edge helper tells Blink which paragraph or button was pointed at and adds full-length page capture, in-place translation and a PDF reader.

Privacy is the design: Blinkling has no telemetry and no answer service of its own — what is picked goes to the user's own Claude Code, under that provider's terms and usage. A capture is held in memory until it has been handed to Claude Code, then dropped, and nothing about it is written to the app's data folder. Blink only looks and explains: it never clicks, types or controls another app, refuses to capture while a password field, a password manager or a private window has focus, and the browser helper blanks password and payment fields before anything leaves the page.

Vibe-coded evidence, in the author's own words on DEV (19 October 2026): "The 3.x releases were built by Claude Code in long builder passes, mostly Sonnet 5.5 with Opus 5.5 asked for the hard calls." The repository's first commit is from 12 October 2026 and it is past 630 commits, with version 3.2.7 the latest at the time of writing. Honest limits, as the author states them: Blinkling needs Claude Code signed in on the same computer (a remote Claude Code host is not supported); on a Mac it needs Screen Recording and Accessibility permission once; the app is not notarized by Apple and has no paid Windows certificate, so macOS may ask the user to choose Open Anyway; Windows and Linux builds exist but have had less real use than the Mac build, which the author tests by hand; and the terminal-mirror direction needs Claude Code's experimental channels flag at startup. GitHub stars: 3 at the 28 October 2026 check.