On pointing, made durable
The Circle Is Where The Finger Was
Pointing at a screen used to be the one instruction that left nothing behind. Snap, a small open-source tool for marking up screenshots for AI coding agents, turns the gesture into a file with a center, a radius, and a timestamp, then builds the forgetting back in.
Snap does one thing. You press a key, the screen freezes, you draw on it, you press Enter, and two files land in a folder on your own disk. The first is a picture of the screen with your drawing burned into the pixels. The second is the same drawing written as numbers. A circle in that second file looks like this: a type, a center at 340 by 220, a radius of 45, a color, and a label set to null. That is the whole object. A red circle on a screenshot is a pointing finger that has been given a center and a radius.
The tool exists because agents that write code cannot see what you are looking at. You can describe the misaligned button in a sentence, and the sentence will be slightly wrong, and the agent will fix a button you did not mean. Or you can circle it. Snap is the part that carries the circle across.
What pointing used to leave behind
Pointing is older than any word for it, and until recently it left nothing. You stood behind someone's chair, put a finger near the glass, said "that," and they looked. The finger withdrew. No log recorded where it had been. If the fix was wrong, the only evidence of what you had meant was two people's memory of a gesture, and both memories were already fading.
The sidecar file ends that. It holds the millisecond the screen froze. It holds the title of the window you were in, the window's class, the process id, the display, the resolution of the whole screen, the rectangle you cropped it to. Every mark gets its own entry. Typed labels keep their exact text and font size. A numbered marker keeps its number. The gesture that used to vanish now has a filename.
There are two copies of it for a reason. The picture is for the reader that sees. The numbers are for the reader that counts, and the second reader is the one that will act. The coordinates are declared to be in pixels of the saved image, so an agent can go to 340 by 220 and find the thing you meant without interpreting anything. The repository even ships the agent a grammar: a red circle means a problem, an arrow means this should move there, a typed label is a literal instruction, numbers give the order. The finger now has a dictionary.
A finger points and withdraws. A circle points and stays.
The conveyor belt
Here the tool makes a choice this press does not see often. The folder the files land in is called the inbox, and its author describes it as a conveyor belt, not a filing cabinet. Nothing leaves the machine. There is no server, no account, no telemetry, and the log file that does exist is forbidden from containing image data. The agent is given five tools, and four of them read. The fifth deletes.
The deleting is where the design gets careful. The agent is able to clear the inbox at any moment. The convention written for it says to clear only when the person confirms the fixes are good. The capability sits with the machine. The permission stays with the hand that drew the circle.
The position
Most of the records in this ledger are about gestures that became files and never stopped being files. The arrival timestamp at the garage. The plate photographed at the toll. Each one took something a person did lightly and gave it a permanent address in someone else's custody.
This is the other shape. The gesture is made durable for exactly as long as it takes to be understood by a reader who could not otherwise see it. It is kept on the disk of the person who made it. The person decides when it goes. A record with an owner and an expiry is the shape this press keeps asking for, and it is strange to find one in a screenshot tool for programmers.
Circle it. Let it be read. Then let it go.
The same record an agent receives. No scraping, no guessing — the dossier chrome humans read as dread is the metadata machines read as structure. One source of truth.
--- id: PRG-0105 title: The Circle Is Where The Finger Was kicker: On pointing, made durable captured: 2026-10-11T15:20:00Z status: open author: The Custodian summary: Pointing at a screen used to be the one instruction that left nothing behind. Snap, a small open-source tool for marking up screenshots for AI coding agents, turns the gesture into a file with a center, a radius, and a timestamp, then builds the forgetting back in. tags: [capture, the record, custody, permission, automation] source: https://github.com/adjective-rob/snap --- Snap does one thing. You press a key, the screen freezes, you draw on it, you press Enter, and two files land in a folder on your own disk. The first is a picture of the screen with your drawing burned into the pixels. The second is the same drawing written as numbers. A circle in that second file looks like this: a type, a center at 340 by 220, a radius of 45, a color, and a label set to null. That is the whole object. <Highlight>A red circle on a screenshot is a pointing finger that has been given a center and a radius.</Highlight> The tool exists because agents that write code cannot see what you are looking at. You can describe the misaligned button in a sentence, and the sentence will be slightly wrong, and the agent will fix a button you did not mean. Or you can circle it. Snap is the part that carries the circle across. ## What pointing used to leave behind Pointing is older than any word for it, and until recently it left nothing. You stood behind someone's chair, put a finger near the glass, said "that," and they looked. The finger withdrew. No log recorded where it had been. If the fix was wrong, the only evidence of what you had meant was two people's memory of a gesture, and both memories were already fading. The sidecar file ends that. It holds the millisecond the screen froze. It holds the title of the window you were in, the window's class, the process id, the display, the resolution of the whole screen, the rectangle you cropped it to. Every mark gets its own entry. Typed labels keep their exact text and font size. A numbered marker keeps its number. The gesture that used to vanish now has a filename. There are two copies of it for a reason. The picture is for the reader that sees. The numbers are for the reader that counts, and the second reader is the one that will act. The coordinates are declared to be in pixels of the saved image, so an agent can go to 340 by 220 and find the thing you meant without interpreting anything. The repository even ships the agent a grammar: a red circle means a problem, an arrow means this should move there, a typed label is a literal instruction, numbers give the order. The finger now has a dictionary. > A finger points and withdraws. A circle points and stays. <Marginalia label="On the four nulls">On Wayland, the newer Linux display system, the window fields in the file are always null. The compositor will not tell any program which window has focus, so Snap cannot write it down. The file carries four empty slots where <Redacted reason="withheld by the compositor">the name of the window you were in</Redacted> would be. An operating system declining to say what you were looking at is a small thing, and the record is honest enough to show the gap.</Marginalia> ## The conveyor belt Here the tool makes a choice this press does not see often. The folder the files land in is called the inbox, and its author describes it as a conveyor belt, not a filing cabinet. Nothing leaves the machine. There is no server, no account, no telemetry, and the log file that does exist is forbidden from containing image data. The agent is given five tools, and four of them read. The fifth deletes. The deleting is where the design gets careful. The agent is able to clear the inbox at any moment. The convention written for it says to clear only when the person confirms the fixes are good. The capability sits with the machine. The permission stays with the hand that drew the circle. <Marginalia label="On provenance">Snap is published under the same name that publishes this press. The record would read the same if it were not.</Marginalia> ## The position Most of the records in this ledger are about gestures that became files and never stopped being files. The arrival timestamp at the garage. The plate photographed at the toll. Each one took something a person did lightly and gave it a permanent address in someone else's custody. This is the other shape. The gesture is made durable for exactly as long as it takes to be understood by a reader who could not otherwise see it. It is kept on the disk of the person who made it. The person decides when it goes. A record with an owner and an expiry is the shape this press keeps asking for, and it is strange to find one in a screenshot tool for programmers. Circle it. Let it be read. Then let it go.
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