The AsX Field Guide

Step one

Install and grant access

Open the DMG and drag AsX into Applications, then launch it once from there.

Nothing appears in the Dock — AsX is a menu-bar app by design, so it never takes over your window layout or steals your place in the app switcher. Look for its icon in the menu bar instead. On the very first launch it tells you exactly what to do next: “AsX ready — press Option+Space.”

The two permissions, and why

macOS will ask for Accessibility. This is the whole trick: it is what lets AsX read the text of the window you are looking at, which is how it answers without you pasting anything. Grant it in System Settings when prompted, then press ⌥Space again.

Screen Recording is asked for separately, and only when it is actually needed — when an app exposes no readable text and a picture is the only way to see it. If everything you use exposes text, you may never see that prompt at all.

Step two

Unlock asking

The timer and the fox are free. Asking is Pro, and Pro comes two ways: with the models included, or with a key of your own.

Models included — nothing to paste

AsX supplies the models: every GPT model, from the fast ones to the largest, with $5 of model credit each month. No OpenAI account, no key. Open the + menu on the bar, choose Get AsX Pro, pick the plan, and pay in the browser — the app is listening and unlocks itself the moment the payment goes through. The bar then shows what is left of the month, and says so before the credit runs out rather than after.

Bring your own key

If you already have a provider account, Pro is $5 a month or $49 once, and every question is billed to that account at cost — AsX never marks it up and never sees the bill. Open the + menu, choose Settings…, and on the Keys & Models tab paste your key into the single field. You do not have to say which provider it is: keys announce themselves in their own prefix.

Connecting a key verifies it before saving it. AsX asks the provider for a real model listing rather than pinging a token, because a key that cannot list models cannot answer questions either — and that listing is exactly what the model picker needs anyway. A bad key tells you so on the spot, instead of failing later on a question you cared about.

Connect as many as you like. Each provider gets its own Keychain entry and remembers the model you last pinned there, so switching is one click and lands you back where you were. The model chip in the composer always shows which account your next question is billed to.

Step three

Ask your first question

Put any window in front of you — a form, a dense article, a PDF, an error message — and press ⌥Space.

The panel slides in at the right edge. Your app stays frontmost and keeps its cursor, so you are never bounced out of what you were doing. Type the question and press ↩.

Read the context chip

That chip is the most important control in the app. It says Sharing followed by the title of the window being read. Click the ✕ on it to pause sharing — the chip switches to Not sharing, the placeholder changes to “Sharing paused — ask anyway,” and AsX becomes an ordinary chat until you turn it back on. Nothing about your screen is ambient or invisible.

The three cards are starter prompts for when you do not know what to ask yet. They disappear as soon as the conversation begins.

The row under the field

• + — share the screen, capture a region, or attach files. See the next step.
• Normal — how AsX is allowed to work. Covered in step seven.
• Auto — which model answers. Leave it on Auto until you have a reason not to; the picker lists exactly what your connected key can reach.
• ↑ — send. While an answer is streaming this becomes a stop button, and Esc does the same thing, keeping whatever text has already arrived.

Step four

Show it something

Four ways to put a picture or a file in front of the model, because people already have a habit for each one.

⌘V only claims the keystroke when the clipboard actually holds something attachable. Otherwise it falls straight through and pastes text into your question, which is what it has to keep doing. It is also scoped to the panel — ⌘V in the Keys & Models window is still “paste my API key.”

The + menu also holds Share screen, a plain on/off. Off, AsX falls back to reading the window’s text — which is faster, cheaper, and enough for most questions. An attachment on its own is already a complete question; send an image with no text at all and AsX takes it as “what is this?”

Step five

Shrink to the mini bar

The sidebar is right for a real conversation. For a long reading session it is more app than you need — so collapse it.

Click the shrink arrows in the panel header and AsX becomes a glass capsule that floats over your work, still watching context. Click the outward arrows on the pill to go back to the sidebar; the transcript is the same conversation, not a second one.

The pill carries only what you need mid-task: the context chip, + for attachments and sharing, and the speech bubble, which unfurls a pocket chat underneath. The ring around the sparkle spins while AsX is thinking, so you can look away and still know when the answer has landed.

Step six

Modes and skills

Click the Normal chip in the composer to open the one menu that decides how much AsX is allowed to do.

Two modes

Normal is the default and the safe one: AsX answers in chat and never touches your system. Admin lets it act — clicking, typing, moving files, running terminal commands. It asks before anything destructive, and the placeholder changes to “Command your Mac — try ‘clean my desktop’” so you always know which mode you are typing into. Admin needs the Accessibility grant from step one. It is marked beta, and the label is meant literally: it can misread a screen or lose the thread of a long errand, so watch it on anything that matters.

Three skills

• Browse — searches the web and reads pages, so answers are not stuck at the model’s training cutoff. On out of the box.
• Prompt craft — ask for a prompt and AsX writes or polishes one. Polishing means editing what you wrote, not inflating it into something you did not write: same length, same voice, same language, with only the ambiguity fixed. It comes back in a code block with a one-click copy tile. On out of the box.
• Goal mode — widens the step budget and spends it in rounds, injecting a progress check as it goes, so a long task keeps going and a thrashing one gets told to change approach. Turn it on for real work; leave it off for quick questions.

Reference

Every control in the header

Reference

Keyboard

Plainly

What actually leaves your Mac

Only your question and the context you have allowed, sent directly to the provider whose key you connected. There is no AsX server in the middle to send it through.

• You see what it sees. The context chip names the window being read, and one click pauses it. Text-only mode means no image is ever sent.
• Keys live in your Keychain, one entry per provider, each with a per-app ACL — an entry written by anything other than AsX cannot be read without an authorization prompt.
• Dictation is local. macOS transcribes on-device; no audio goes anywhere.

If something goes wrong

Three things worth checking

• ⌥Space does nothing. Another app has claimed the shortcut — Spotlight, Alfred and Raycast are the usual suspects. Release it there, or check that AsX is still running in the menu bar.
• Answers ignore the page. Accessibility was never granted, or was reset when the app was replaced. Re-grant it in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility, then quit and relaunch AsX.
• The key was rejected. AsX shows the provider’s own reason inline. Copy the key again with no trailing space, and confirm the account has billing or free-tier quota.