Cast a watching ward over your Mac. See your AI agents work. Intruders can't.

Wardlume is a macOS menu-bar app for botsitting — leaving your AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, …) running while you step away. It locks the keyboard, mouse, and trackpad behind an animated glass shield, so the screen stays fully visible — anyone in the room can watch the agent work — but nothing can be touched. Unlock instantly with Touch ID.

Features

• 🛡️ Glass-shield ward — an animated Metal overlay over your live desktop. The screen stays readable while input is hard-locked at the macOS event-tap level.
• 🧭 Guided setup — a first-launch wizard walks you through all three permissions (request → grant → verified live), powered by PermissionPilot, our open-source permissions-onboarding SDK for Mac apps.
• 👆 Touch ID unlock — rest your finger or press your unlock shortcut; falls back to your password.
• ⌨️ Configurable hotkeys — remap the activate and unlock shortcuts, with an optional no-auth emergency-exit key.
• 🎭 Bait-and-switch reactions — a wrong touch springs a reaction image and sound. Ships with Silent Professional, Wizard, and Grumpy Old Man packs, or drop in your own cover image, reaction image, and audio.
• 🖥️ Multi-display aware — secondary screens are covered while the ward is active.
• 🔒 Local-only — no network, no analytics, no accounts. Nothing leaves your Mac.

Wardlume isn't notarized by Apple yet. Homebrew is the cleanest install — it sidesteps the Gatekeeper "damaged" prompt entirely. The direct downloads work too, with one small one-time step.

Homebrew (recommended)

brew tap arpitagarwal1301/tap
brew trust arpitagarwal1301/tap
brew install --cask wardlume

Installs cleanly — no "damaged" prompt, no quarantine cleanup. Homebrew 6+ requires trusting a third-party tap once before installing from it; on older Homebrew, brew trust doesn't exist and isn't needed — just skip that line.

Installer (.pkg)

1. Download Wardlume-1.3.0.pkg from the latest release.
2. Open it; if macOS calls it "unidentified," right-click → Open (or System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway) once.
3. Click through the installer — Wardlume lands in Applications and opens normally.

Disk image (.dmg)

1. Download Wardlume-1.3.0.dmg and drag Wardlume into Applications.
2. macOS will say "Wardlume is damaged" — it isn't; unsigned downloads are just quarantined. Clear it once:

   xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Wardlume.app

Requires macOS Tahoe 26+ on Apple Silicon. Source-available — read every line of what it does in this repo.

Usage

1. Launch Wardlume — it lives in your menu bar.
2. Press ⌘⇧L from anywhere (even while focused in your IDE), or use the menu, to activate the ward.
3. Walk away. The screen stays visible under the glass shield; keyboard, mouse, and trackpad are locked.
4. Return and rest your finger on Touch ID — or press ⌘⇧U — to unlock.

Want a guaranteed way out? Enable the optional emergency-exit shortcut in Settings → Shortcuts (off by default).

Permissions

On first launch a guided setup (built on PermissionPilot) walks you through the three permissions Wardlume needs, each used only while the ward is active:

Permission	Why
Screen Recording	Render the live desktop behind the glass (never saved or transmitted)
Accessibility	Lock the keyboard, mouse, and trackpad
Input Monitoring	Detect intrusion attempts

The wizard requests each one, deep-links to the exact System Settings pane, re-checks live as you grant, and offers a one-click Quit & Reopen for the grants macOS only applies after a relaunch. Re-run it anytime from the menu bar → Permissions Setup… — and when everything is already granted, opening Wardlume lands on Settings → Overview instead.

Build from source

Requires Xcode 16+ on macOS Tahoe 26+.

git clone https://github.com/arpitagarwal1301/wardlume.git
cd wardlume
open Wardlume.xcodeproj

Select the Wardlume scheme and press ⌘R. Built with Swift, SwiftUI, AppKit, Metal, and ScreenCaptureKit.

More

• Safety notes — escape hatches and security boundaries
• PermissionPilot — the zero-dependency SwiftUI permissions/onboarding SDK behind Wardlume's setup wizard (also ours, MIT)
• Privacy · Terms
• Roadmap · Contributing
• License — PolyForm Noncommercial 1.0.0 (noncommercial use; commercial use reserved)

---

Built with 🪄 by Arpit Agarwal. Inspired by every Mac running AI agents at coffee shops worldwide.