Backstage — Development skill for Claude Code

Backstage

Your AI agents keep grabbing your screen. Backstage makes them stay backstage.

Anyone running browser automation (Claude, CDP seats, Playwright, agent stacks) knows the moment: a window you did not ask for jumps in front of you, your dictation dies mid-sentence, your typing lands in the wrong app. Backstage is a macOS menu-bar app that ends it. Your agents keep working, in the background, where they belong. Your screen stays yours.

What it does

• Bounces uninvited grabs and puts you back where you were, measured in single-digit milliseconds on the shipped build.
• Knows your browser from your agent's browser, per running process. Your own Chrome is never touched, even though it is the same app.
• Your clicks always win. When you open a guarded app, it opens. Only programmatic grabs get bounced.
• Dictation shield. Engage it and nothing may steal focus at all while you speak.
• Agents can ask permission. A one-line CLI grants a timed on-screen pass, for the login your agent genuinely needs you to type. It expires by itself.
• Storm-proof by design. A misbehaving agent trips a breaker (6 bounces per 60 seconds per app, then a 5-minute pause) instead of turning the guard into its own problem.
• Every decision is logged, locally, in ~/Library/Logs/backstage/decisions.jsonl.
• Runs entirely on your machine. No account, no network calls, nothing leaves your Mac.

Why it exists

We built Backstage because it happened to us. Our own agent's browser stole the founder's screen every fifteen minutes, mid-dictation, until the words being dictated were typed into the agent's window instead of the founder's own. We traced the exact line of code that does it, a standard call every browser-automation stack makes, and realized every AI-agent user has this problem.

Install

Build it from source

Requires macOS 13 or newer and Xcode command line tools.

git clone https://github.com/iansteitz1-eng/backstage.git
cd backstage
./build-app.sh
open dist/