Brilliant. This is exactly the kind of content I seek when I visit Hacker News.

Truly art.

Do you remember when PCs used to come with a completely soup-to-nuts tutorial that would talk to you like you had never seen a PC before? Things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ScS4OYDfHE

This kind of baked-in interactivity could really help in a training or disability context.

A big arrow to an interface element which ... has a label that explains what it does?

So...a label for a label?

I don't know why anyone would ever willingly want this.

- rainbow dripping arrows

- angrily pointing arrows

- flame-surrounded text boxes with particle effects

- the ability for the agent to play airhorn.wav at max volume, overriding existing volume or mute settings

EDIT: ayy lmao https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/big-arrow-on-the-screen/p...

Grim. If you're just there to click sudo buttons for the bot, you might as well give it root access and be done.

That would be a godsent for those of us with aging parents.

For web apps, WebMCP is a way where you can make a frontend way more discoverable to an LLM rather than that it is going to read all your code. I sometimes create this in my apps at home and sometimes in my apps at work and it makes LLM assistants way more usable. It also helps if they can highlight certain things of a visual.

We humans can do this too on paper. We can point at something, we can highlight something with a marker. Why not give an LLM these capabilities as well?

What terminal / agentic workflows spawn the demonstrated dialogue boxes that require the User to click/reject the action? Aren't most such flows actually inline UIs? And finally, if the core issue is that these confirmation boxes are tied to the terminal that triggered them, which does not autofocus, what's the point of said "big arrow" that is also lurking behind without focus?

If the said "big arrow" automatically gains focus, isn't the real fix here to just make the dialogue boxes themselves gain focus automatically? Both are similarly disruptive anyway.

  %  @(#)handy.ps
  %
  %  Handy Pointer
  %  Copyright (C) 1989.
  %  By Don Hopkins. (don@brillig.umd.edu)
  %  All rights reserved.

PSIBER Space Deck and Pseudo Scientific Visualizer Demo:

https://youtu.be/_fqCeuue5Ac?t=213

The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...

Arrows have existed since roughly the Paleolithic.

Whenever I use web tools that don't have "deep linking" [0], I love to throw out this quote:

"Have we thought about using hyperlinks? They are these SUPER useful things that were invented in Switzerland back in the 1990s."

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking

I'm wondering if the AI has been trained on Franz. Which would also explain why the Terminator ends up with Manner Schnitten.

Does one need 4 programming languages to draw something on a mac?

Why does this need to be a skill? Literally just ask Claude to “call out actions in these screenshots with numbered stylized arrows” and you get the same thing without burning tens of thousands of tokens in context.

(OP, nice project! Sorry for my rant.)

"It's this window, not that one." You have 14 Chrome windows. The agent knows which one it means: --window "Google Chrome:Pull request". It even picks the right tab: --app "Google Chrome:Pull request".

Remote help. "No, the other gear icon." Point at it instead of describing it.

To me this feels like it takes away from what the human is supposed to do (read, understand the consequences of the action, then.. consent or abort)

There is a reason your AI Agent won't automate these clicks for you

But I feel dumber just by looking at it. If this is how this will look like in 10 years, why to make desktop at all. Just connect mic and speaker to your PC or talk to the phone: 'I need new pair of socks. Order 10 for me. In your favourige color it will be 21.37. Should I charge your credit card?'.

It is not like most of the people enjoy computers. I am pretty sure they do not. They just need them to operate systems they need: government websites, banks, maps, restaurant menus etc. If some agent will do that for them, why bother looking at screen at all? Rich people have it with their own personal assistants.

big-arrow-on-the-screen (bigarrow): one small macOS CLI and an agent skill. Click-through, never steals the focus, gone by itself. MIT.

I absolutely loathe this phrasing now. I don’t even know what part of it is good or notable.

I remember taking your SEO course many moons ago.