Clawd Cursor

Safe desktop control for any AI agent. Compiles the screen into a UI map and acts on elements by stable id (screenshot/vision only as a last resort),
verifies its own actions, and gates everything through one safety checkpoint. Local · cross-OS · any model.

Quickstart · Why it's different · The engine · How it works · Tools · Platforms · Changelog

What it is

Clawd Cursor is a local MCP server that gives any tool-calling agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenClaw, the Claude Agent SDK, or your own loop — safe control of the real desktop. It clicks, types, reads the screen, opens apps, and drives any GUI the way a human would: native apps, the browser, even a canvas.

Most "let an agent use the computer" tools take a screenshot and feed it to a vision model — slow, expensive, and brittle. Clawd Cursor compiles the screen into one UI map: it fuses the accessibility tree and OCR into a confidence-scored set of elements, each tagged with a stable el_NN id, and acts on elements by id — not pixel coordinates. Coordinates appear only in the last-resort screenshot/vision tier (live pixels off the current frame), for canvas-only apps or tasks that genuinely need spatial reasoning. The result is cheaper, faster, private, and — uniquely — it checks that each action actually did what it claimed.

If a human can do it on a screen, your agent can too. No API, no integration, no problem — only the right sequence of reads, clicks, keys, and waits. Use it as the last-mile fallback: native API exists? Use it. CLI? Use it. Clawd Cursor is for the click, the legacy app, the GUI with no public surface.

Why it's different

The desktop-agent space is crowded. The closest install-and-go peers are Windows-MCP and Terminator (desktop MCP servers); browser-only tools (browser-use, Playwright MCP) are adjacent; and OmniParser / UI-TARS are vision-centric parsing approaches you'd build an agent around, not products you install. Here's the honest comparison across those approaches — what Clawd Cursor does that the popular options don't:

Three things here are genuinely rare:

1. Cheapest-tier-first perception, fully local. Accessibility tree (free) → OCR (cheap) → screenshot (expensive — the only tier that puts pixels in the model's context; "screenshot" and "vision" are the same step). The agent climbs only when it must, so token cost tracks task difficulty — and with a local model, nothing leaves the machine. Vision-centric agents (OmniParser, UI-TARS) need a screenshot in the model for every observation.
2. It verifies. Pass expect on a consequential action and Clawd Cursor re-checks the live screen (with a short settle window for async UIs) and reports a DEVIATION instead of a hollow "success." A completed task can't be marked done on evidence that was already true before it acted.
3. One safety gate. Every call — from an editor over stdio, an external agent over HTTP, or the built-in loop — routes through a single safety.evaluate() chokepoint (allow / confirm / block) before it touches the desktop. The agent cannot bypass it.

Plus: an on-screen "desktop control in progress" banner with a blinking red dot whenever an agent is driving — double-click it to stop. A human at the machine always knows, and always has a kill switch.

Install

clawdcursor is an MCP server published to npm — install it into any MCP-capable agent (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, OpenAI Codex, or your own loop) the same way you install any other MCP server.

1 — Install the engine + grant consent (once)

npm i -g clawdcursor
clawdcursor consent --accept    # one-time desktop-control consent (required)
clawdcursor grant               # macOS only — approve Accessibility + Screen Recording

Zero-install also works — swap clawdcursor for npx -y clawdcursor in any snippet below and npx fetches it on demand. A global install is recommended anyway: it's pinnable and inspectable on disk (safer for a tool with full desktop control than auto-fetching latest every run), and it's the path on which the macOS native helper builds at install time. Requires Node.js 20+.

Per-OS prerequisites. Windows installs clean — sharp and @nut-tree-fork/nut-js ship prebuilt binaries, so no C++/Python build tools are needed. macOS needs Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) for screenshots / vision; core accessibility-driven control still works without them. Linux needs a few system packages npm can't install: tesseract-ocr (OCR), python3-gi + gir1.2-atspi-2.0 (accessibility tree), and — on Wayland — ydotool (synthetic input).

2 — Add it to your agent (pick your host)

One click, if your host supports it:

These hand the host the npx config below, so they work with or without a global install. Everything that follows is the same thing done by hand, per host.

Claude Code

claude mcp add clawdcursor -s user -- clawdcursor mcp --compact

OpenAI Codex — add to ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.clawdcursor]
command = "clawdcursor"
args = ["mcp", "--compact"]

Cursor / Windsurf / Claude Desktop — add to the host's MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "clawdcursor": { "command": "clawdcursor", "args": ["mcp", "--compact"] }
  }
}

Zed — Zed uses context_servers (not mcpServers) in settings.json:

{
  "context_servers": {
    "clawdcursor": { "command": { "path": "clawdcursor", "args": ["mcp", "--compact"] } }
  }
}