TL;DR: This AirJelly guide covers the first context-aware proactive desktop agent — an always-on AI that watches every app you use, remembers your work locally, and surfaces tasks before you ask. It runs 100% on your machine, it's free right now, and it's the closest thing yet to an assistant that already knows what you're working on.
What Is AirJelly? (And Why Everyone's Talking About It)
AirJelly is an always-on desktop AI agent that observes your on-screen activity across every app, builds a searchable timeline of your work, and acts on it proactively. The team behind it calls it "the world's first context-aware proactive agent," and after using it, the label holds up. Most of this AirJelly guide is about that one word: proactive.
Here's the problem it attacks. Every AI assistant you currently use is reactive. It sits idle until you type something. Worse, it knows nothing about your actual work — you have to paste in context every single time. You become the integration layer, manually ferrying information between your brain, your tabs, and a chat box.
The workflow before AirJelly looked like this: sit through a call, forget half of it, dig through Slack on Thursday trying to remember what you promised on Tuesday, reconstruct your week from calendar entries and vibes. Notes apps don't fix this. They only capture what you remembered to write down, which is the problem restated.
The workflow after is different. AirJelly runs in the background, reads across Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Calendar, email, your browser and your editor, and builds a continuously updating record. Then it pulls tasks out of conversations on its own, attaches due dates and source context, and reminds you at the moment it matters. You stop being the integration layer.
Who Is AirJelly For?
If your work generates more context than you can hold in your head, this AirJelly tutorial is aimed at you. The tool is built for people who move between many apps and many threads in a single day, and who lose real money or credibility when something falls through.
Specifically:
- Freelancers and consultants who bill hourly and routinely under-bill because they can't reconstruct the week
- Agency owners and account managers who need client status reports without spending Friday afternoon writing them
- Founders and executives walking into back-to-back meetings with no prep time
- Product, ops and engineering teams tracking decisions across Slack, docs and tickets
- Researchers and PhD students drowning in papers, tabs and half-read PDFs
- Developers running coding agents who need to feed Claude Code or Codex real project context
Skill level isn't the gate here. AirJelly requires no prompt engineering background to get value on day one — the Daily Report and auto-captured tasks work with zero configuration.
Key Features of AirJelly
Cross-App Timeline
AirJelly maintains a full log of everything it observed, across every application. This is the foundation everything else sits on. Because it captures continuously rather than on command, the timeline contains the things you didn't think to record — which are usually the things you need later.
Automatic Task Capture
The tool extracts action items directly from conversations, meetings and messages, complete with due dates and the context they came from. You don't write the task. It notices that you said "I'll send that Friday" and creates it. This is where most of the AirJelly use cases start.
Persistent Memory You Can Query
Ask about anything from your past work at any time. Not "what's in this document" but "what did we decide about the pricing tier and why." The memory layer is what separates this from a screen recorder — it's queryable history, not just a log.
Proactive Alerts and Briefs
AirJelly sends follow-ups, reminders and pre-meeting briefs at the right moment rather than waiting to be asked. It sees the calendar event, assembles background on the person or company, and hands you talking points before you join the call.
Fully Local Processing
Screen activity, notes and conversations never leave your machine. No cloud sync, no training on your data. This matters more than it sounds: it's the reason you can point AirJelly at client work, NDA'd material and private channels that no cloud assistant would be permitted near.
How to Get Started with AirJelly in 5 Minutes
Everyone searching how to use AirJelly hits the same two snags — permissions and patience. Here's the path that avoids both.
Download the right build. Go to airjelly.ai and click Download. Choose the Apple Silicon build for Mac or the x64 build for Windows. Linux isn't supported yet. There's no account wall and, at the time of writing, no paid tier to clear.
Grant permissions properly. On macOS, open System Settings and approve both Screen Recording and Accessibility when prompted. This is non-negotiable — AirJelly reads what's on screen, so without both permissions it captures nothing. On Windows, approve the capture dialog.
Let it run for a full session before judging it. AirJelly starts with zero history. It has no idea what you did last month. Two or three hours of normal work makes it useful; a full day makes it genuinely good. Most people who bounce on day one quit at hour two.
Audit the Timeline view. Scroll through what it actually captured. You'll quickly see which apps it reads cleanly and where the gaps are. Knowing the gaps now makes your prompts far more accurate later.
Clear the first batch of auto-captured Tasks. AirJelly will have already pulled action items out of your chats. Accept the good ones, delete the noise. Each correction teaches you which phrasing it catches, which sharpens how you prompt it.
Beginner tip: pin the Daily Report. The end-of-day summary is the highest-value surface in the app and the easiest habit to actually build around.
7 Best Use Cases for AirJelly
1. Reconstruct a Billable Day
Ask what you worked on between 9am and 6pm and AirJelly rebuilds the day from real screen activity rather than memory. A consultant who normally rounds a messy Tuesday down to four hours can see it was actually six and a quarter. For anyone billing hourly, this is the use case that pays for the install immediately.
2. Never Drop a Promise Again
AirJelly tracks commitments made inside conversations — the "I'll get that over to you by Friday" that you meant sincerely and then forgot completely. It surfaces the promise before the deadline, with the original message attached so you know exactly what you signed up for.
3. Automatic Pre-Meeting Briefs
It spots the meeting on your calendar, pulls your full interaction history with that person or company, and prepares background and talking points. Walking into a client call already knowing what was left unresolved last time changes the entire dynamic of the conversation.
4. Collapse Research Sprawl
Fourteen open tabs across papers, docs and notes become one summarized page. In the team's own example, the summary surfaced a note the user had saved weeks earlier and forgotten. Researchers and PhD students get the most dramatic version of this.
5. Decision Archaeology
Three weeks later, ask why a decision was made. AirJelly finds the thread where it actually happened — who was in it, what alternatives were on the table, what reasoning was given. This replaces the twenty-minute Slack search that usually ends in "I think it was Marcus?"
6. Full Context Handoff to Coding Agents
AirJelly explicitly assembles scattered context so Claude Code and Codex can act with the complete picture. Instead of pasting one file and hoping, you hand your agent a brief containing the goal, prior decisions, files touched, blockers hit, and things you deliberately ruled out.
7. Painless Client Status Reports
Ask for everything touching one client this week and get a report you can lightly edit and send. Fifteen minutes on Friday replaces the hour you'd otherwise spend, and clients who can see the work are much harder to lose.
5 Copy-Paste Prompts for AirJelly
These are the best AirJelly prompts to start with — each one assumes AirJelly has at least a few days of timeline to draw on.
Prompt 1: Billable Day Reconstruction
Reconstruct my working day from my timeline. Group everything into billable
blocks by client or project, with start and end times and a one-line
description of work done in each block. Flag any block over 20 minutes you
cannot confidently attribute to a client, and list those as unattributed time.
Prompt 2: The Forgotten Promise Sweep
Scan my conversations, meetings and messages from the last 14 days. Extract
every commitment I personally made to another person. For each: who I
promised, what I promised, the date I said it, the stated or implied
deadline, and whether I have since done it. Sort by most overdue first.
Prompt 3: Pre-Meeting Brief
I have a meeting with [NAME or COMPANY]. Build a one-page brief: our full
interaction history, what was agreed or left open last time, commitments
either side made, unresolved questions, and three talking points I should
lead with. Under 400 words, open items at the top.
Prompt 4: Context Handoff to Coding Agents
Assemble a complete context package for [PROJECT or FEATURE] to hand to a
coding agent. Include: the current goal, every decision made and why, files
and repos I have been working in, errors or blockers I hit, and anything I
explicitly decided NOT to do. Format as a single markdown brief written for
an AI agent with zero prior context.
Prompt 5: Weekly Retro With Receipts
Run my weekly retro from the timeline. Section 1: what actually shipped, with
evidence. Section 2: what slipped and the specific reason. Section 3: time
sinks — hours that produced no visible output. Section 4: carryover, ranked.
Be blunt in section 3. I want the pattern, not encouragement.
AirJelly vs. Rewind: Which Should You Use?
The obvious comparison is Rewind, the other well-known local-first tool that records your screen and makes it searchable. Both run on-device, both build a history of your work, and both let you query the past.
The difference is posture. Rewind is fundamentally a search engine for your own memory — excellent when you know something happened and need to find it. AirJelly is an agent that acts on that history without being asked, creating tasks, preparing briefs and firing reminders on its own. If you want a perfect recall archive you query deliberately, Rewind is mature and well-built. If you want something that pushes the next action at you, AirJelly's proactive layer is the point. AirJelly is also much newer, which cuts both ways: fewer rough edges have been sanded off, but it's free right now.
How to Make Money with AirJelly
1. Recover the Hours You're Already Eating
Most freelancers under-bill because reconstructing a week honestly is impossible, so they round down out of guilt. AirJelly rebuilds the day from evidence. Recovering three unbilled hours a week at a $100 rate is roughly $15,600 a year — from a free tool, with no new clients.
2. Sell Context Engineering as a Service
Every team now runs coding agents and most feed them garbage context. Install AirJelly, run the context handoff prompt, and deliver clients a clean context package plus a prompt library their agents can actually use. Framed as a two-week observation and delivery engagement, this prices at $1,500–$5,000 on outcome rather than hours.
3. Productize the Status Report
Agencies lose retainers to silence — clients who can't see what they're paying for. Generate client reports every Friday and send them unprompted. That's fifteen minutes of work that makes a retainer meaningfully harder to cancel, and freelancers can attach a premium reporting tier worth 10–20% on top of existing invoices.
Frequently Asked Questions About AirJelly
Is AirJelly free?
Yes. AirJelly is free to download right now for Apple Silicon Macs and Windows x64 PCs, with all current features included and no paid tier required. The company has signalled this may change as the product grows, so early users are getting the generous version.
Is AirJelly safe to use?
It runs entirely local — screen activity, notes and conversations never leave your machine, there's no cloud sync, and no training on your data. That said, you're granting an application full screen-reading access, so the usual caution applies: it's as safe as your own device is.
What is AirJelly best for?
It's strongest for people juggling many parallel threads — client work, research, multi-project engineering. The standout jobs are billable-time reconstruction, catching commitments made in conversation, and preparing for meetings you had no time to prepare for.
How does AirJelly compare to Rewind?
Rewind is a searchable archive of your screen history; you go to it with a question. AirJelly adds a proactive layer that creates tasks and surfaces briefs without being asked. Rewind is more mature, AirJelly is more autonomous.
Can beginners use AirJelly?
Yes. The Daily Report, Timeline and automatic task capture require no setup beyond granting permissions. Prompting the memory layer is where more experienced users pull ahead, which is exactly what a prompt pack solves.
Final Verdict
AirJelly is the first tool that treats context as infrastructure rather than something you paste into a chat box. That's a real shift. The proactive layer — tasks appearing without you writing them, briefs arriving before meetings — is the part that changes behaviour rather than just impressing you once.
It isn't finished. It starts with zero history so the first day feels thin, Linux users are shut out, and pointing a continuously-recording agent at your entire workday is a decision worth making deliberately. The local-only architecture is what makes that decision defensible.
If you bill for your time, manage clients, or run coding agents that keep working from half the picture, install it today while it's free. If you mostly work in one app and remember everything you do, wait a few releases.
Want the complete AirJelly prompt pack + monetization playbook? I put together a full guide with 10 copy-paste prompts, all 10 use cases mapped out, and a step-by-step monetization playbook. Grab it on Gumroad for $9 →
Published: 2026-09-20 | Updated: 2026-09-20
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