Quick Start

First capture

magpie ships working with zero permissions. There's no dialog on first run and no System Settings detour -- copy something, then press the hotkey:

• Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+M -- capture. Reads whatever's on the clipboard (or, if you've since granted Accessibility, synthesizes a copy of the current selection so you don't need to copy first -- see Concepts for why that's an opt-in upgrade, not the default).
• Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+Alt+M -- screenshot capture. Opens the OS's own interactive region-select UI; the resulting image is OCR'd in the background and becomes searchable once recognition finishes.

A small toast confirms the capture without ever taking keyboard focus -- whatever you were typing into keeps receiving keystrokes the whole time.

Promote it into Now

Everything you capture lands in the stream first -- a single reverse-chronological list, nothing auto-filed. Open the main window, find the item, and promote it into Now: a short, project-scoped working queue you curate on purpose. This is the queue an MCP-connected agent actually sees.

Try the CLI

The same stream is reachable from the terminal:

magpie add "check whether the retry logic handles a 429"
magpie list --now
magpie search retry

Hand it to an agent

If you've registered magpie as an MCP server (see MCP integration), an agent in the same project can now see that item:

> what's in my magpie queue for this project?

The agent calls queue_peek, sees the item you promoted, and can lease it with queue_take to start working on it. Every lease, completion, and failure is recorded in the audit log, visible in the app's Activity tab.