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OpenAdapt: The Demonstration Compiler for Desktop and Web GUIs

Build Status PyPI version Downloads License: MIT Python 3.10+ Discord

Show it once. It runs forever. On your premises.

OpenAdapt compiles a single recorded GUI demonstration into a deterministic, self-healing automation that replays locally at near-zero cost, heals when the UI drifts, verifies its own effects, and halts rather than guessing when the screen stops matching. No API required, no per-run model calls, no data leaving your machine on the default path.

Everything installs from one package and runs from one CLI: pip install openadapt ships the compiler (openadapt flow …) out of the box. Recording, scrubbing, and the research toolkits are optional extras you add only if you need them.

Join us on Discord | Documentation | OpenAdapt.ai


Why a compiler

Every automation tool assumes an API. The systems that actually run regulated work often don't: legacy EMRs, Citrix desktops, and internal apps a team still drives by hand. General computer-use agents can operate those GUIs, but re-reasoning through every step with a large model is slow, expensive, and non-deterministic, and a wrong click writes to the wrong record.

OpenAdapt takes the opposite path for workflows you run over and over. You demonstrate the task once. OpenAdapt compiles that demonstration into a script that replays deterministically and locally, with no model calls on the hot path. When the UI changes, a lower resolution rung re-resolves the target and the fix lands back in the bundle as a reviewable diff. When the screen stops matching expectations, the run halts with a report instead of guessing.


Installation

pip install openadapt              # CLI + demonstration compiler (openadapt flow …)
pip install openadapt[capture]     # + native GUI capture/recording
pip install openadapt[privacy]     # + PII/PHI scrubbing
pip install openadapt[all]         # Everything, including research extras

The flagship compiler ships in the base install, so openadapt flow … works right after pip install openadapt.

Requirements: Python 3.10+


Quick Start

Record a workflow once, compile it into a deterministic bundle, and replay it locally at near-zero cost:

openadapt flow record --url <app> --out rec     # record a workflow once
openadapt flow compile rec --out bundle          # compile it
openadapt flow replay bundle                     # run it, local, $0

Inspect and gate compiled bundles before you ship them:

openadapt flow lint bundle                       # report coverage gaps
openadapt flow certify bundle --policy clinical-write   # enforce a safety policy

openadapt flow <verb> is the recommended path. The standalone openadapt-flow <verb> command keeps working and behaves identically.


How the compiler works

Each compiled step carries a template crop, an OCR label, geometry landmarks, and postconditions derived from what the demo changed on screen. At replay time a resolution ladder tries them in order (local match, global match, OCR, landmark geometry, then optionally a grounding model), so healthy runs cost milliseconds and make no model calls.

  • Deterministic replay. No large model on the hot path, so a compiled run is repeatable and costs effectively nothing per run.
  • Self-healing. When the UI drifts, a lower rung re-resolves the target and the fix lands back in the bundle as a reviewable diff, without a human in the loop.
  • Effect verification. Steps carry postconditions derived from what the demo changed on screen, so a run confirms it did the right thing rather than assuming a click landed.
  • Halt on ambiguity. When the screen stops matching expectations the run halts with a report, and identity-verified steps (for example a wrong-record check) refuse to act on a low-confidence match rather than click the wrong target.

The reference backend is a headless browser, which is why the whole loop runs in CI with no OS permissions. Desktop, Citrix, and RDP backends are adapters in progress that we are validating with design partners, not yet production paths. Compiled workflows can also be emitted as Agent Skills or MCP servers so other agents can invoke them.

In one field test against a computer-use agent on a real third-party EMR (OpenEMR's public demo), compiled replay matched the agent's success (20/20 compiled vs 10/10 agent) at roughly half the median latency and near-zero marginal cost: the agent cost about $0.55 per run, the compiled replay makes zero model calls. This is a small-sample result on a shared, daily-resetting public demo, so it is not CI-reproducible; a CI-reproducible control and the adversarial safety measurements are published alongside it.

See openadapt-flow for the compiler, validation methodology, and known limits.


What ships (the product)

The product is the compiler and the governed runtime around it. These are the supported packages:

Package Role Maturity Repository
openadapt Install + unified CLI (openadapt flow …) Web path usable today This repo
openadapt-flow Demonstration compiler + governed runtime (replay, self-heal, effect-verify, halt-on-ambiguity, policies) Web path usable today; desktop/Citrix/RDP validating with design partners openadapt-flow
openadapt-capture Optional native recorder for desktop GUI events Optional extra openadapt-capture
openadapt-privacy Optional PII/PHI scrubbing (Presidio-backed) Optional extra openadapt-privacy

openadapt-flow also ships standalone on PyPI (pip install openadapt-flow); the standalone openadapt-flow <verb> command behaves identically to openadapt flow <verb>.

CLI reference

openadapt flow record --url <app> --out <dir>    Record a workflow once
openadapt flow compile <rec> --out <bundle>       Compile a recording into a bundle
openadapt flow replay <bundle>                    Replay a bundle (local, $0)
openadapt flow lint <bundle>                       Report a bundle's coverage gaps
openadapt flow certify <bundle> --policy <name>    Enforce a safety policy on a bundle

openadapt capture start --name <name>    Start a native recording (requires [capture])
openadapt capture stop                    Stop recording
openadapt capture list                    List captures
openadapt capture view <name>             Open capture viewer

openadapt version                         Show installed versions
openadapt doctor                          Check system requirements

Research (not the product)

These packages are research, not part of the supported product. They explore whether human demonstrations can improve the accuracy of general computer-use models. They are not required to record, compile, or replay a workflow, and the compiler above makes no model calls on its hot path.

Package Research focus Repository
openadapt-ml Training and inference for multimodal GUI-action models openadapt-ml
openadapt-evals Benchmark evaluation for GUI agents openadapt-evals
openadapt-retrieval Multimodal demonstration retrieval openadapt-retrieval
openadapt-grounding UI element localization / grounding models openadapt-grounding

Install with pip install openadapt[ml,evals]. The openadapt train and openadapt eval commands become available once those extras are installed.

Research thesis: demonstration-conditioned agents

The research line asks a different question from the compiler: instead of compiling one demonstration into a deterministic script, can a model use demonstrations at inference time to disambiguate unfamiliar GUIs?

  • Demonstrate — record user actions and screenshots, scrub PII/PHI, build a searchable demonstration library.
  • Learn — embed and index demonstrations for retrieval, and/or fine-tune Vision-Language Models on them.
  • Execute — condition a policy on retrieved demonstrations, ground intent to coordinates, act behind safety gates, and evaluate to feed results back.

Validated result (research, not product): on a controlled macOS benchmark (45 System Settings tasks sharing a common navigation entry point), demonstration-conditioned prompting improved first-action accuracy from 46.7% to 100%, with a length-matched control (+11.1 pp) confirming the benefit is semantic, not token-length. Phase 2 (retrieval-only prompting) is validated; Phase 3 (demo-conditioned fine-tuning) is in progress. See the research thesis for methodology and limits.

Industry note: OpenCUA (NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight, XLANG Lab) reused OpenAdapt's macOS accessibility capture code in their AgentNetTool, but uses demonstrations only for model training, not runtime conditioning.


Deprecated

  • openadapt-agent is being folded into openadapt-flow and should not be built on. Its execution engine, safety gates, and session handling duplicate the governed runtime that now lives in openadapt-flow. New work belongs in openadapt flow.

Legacy Version

The monolithic OpenAdapt codebase (v0.46.0) is preserved in the legacy/ directory.

pip install openadapt==0.46.0

See docs/LEGACY_FREEZE.md for the migration guide.

Early demonstrations of the legacy version: Twitter demo · Loom walkthrough. For the current architecture, see the documentation.


Permissions

The default headless-browser path needs no OS permissions. Native desktop capture does:

macOS: Grant Accessibility, Screen Recording, and Input Monitoring permissions to your terminal. See permissions guide.

Windows: Run as Administrator if needed for input capture.


Contributing

  1. Join Discord
  2. Pick an issue from the relevant repository
  3. Submit a PR

For sub-package development:

git clone https://github.com/OpenAdaptAI/openadapt-flow  # or another package
cd openadapt-flow
pip install -e ".[dev]"

Related Projects

Internal tooling (not product architecture, listed for transparency): openadapt-wright (dev automation), openadapt-herald (social posts from git history), openadapt-crier (approval bot), openadapt-consilium (multi-model consensus), openadapt-telemetry (error tracking), openadapt-viewer (HTML visualization), and openadapt-desktop / openadapt-tray (GUI shells). These support development and operations; they are not part of the compiler product.


Support


License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.

About

Open-source adapter between multimodal models and desktop/web GUIs. Record a workflow once, then compile it into a deterministic, self-healing replay (openadapt-flow) — or condition, train, and evaluate agents on it. Modular meta-package; install only the extras you need.

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