OpenAI Launches Chronicle for Codex on macOS

OpenAI has launched Chronicle, a new experimental feature for its Codex AI coding assistant on macOS, designed to enhance context awareness by analyzing users' recent screen activity. The opt-in research preview, available exclusively to ChatGPT Pro subscribers, allows Codex to build persistent memories from screenshots, enabling the AI to infer details about workflows, tools, and projects without users needing to repeat information in prompts. Announced this week, the feature is limited to Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14 or later and is not yet accessible in the European Union, United Kingdom, or Switzerland.

Chronicle operates through background agents that periodically capture screenshots of the user's display. These images are temporarily stored on the device and sent to OpenAI's servers for processing, where optical character recognition and visual analysis extract relevant text and context, such as error messages, open documents, or active applications. The resulting structured memories are saved locally as unencrypted Markdown files in a designated directory, which users can inspect, edit, or delete. OpenAI states that raw screenshots are automatically deleted after...