A new build dropped this week, and step two of how people are using it is the actual twist. It’s not another voice-to-text plugin, it’s a screen recorder that lets you draw and talk over what’s on screen, then hands that clip straight to your coding agent. u/Different_Scholar_74 posted it in r/PromptEngineering after getting tired of screenshotting buttons, cropping them, and drawing arrows just so an AI agent could follow along. Anyone who’s spent twenty minutes assembling a bug report out of five separate screenshots and a paragraph explaining how they connect knows exactly the pain this is solving.
The tool is called xannotate, and the poster’s workflow is refreshingly blunt: agents can’t see your screen, so stop typing paragraphs about it and just show them. Anyone who’s used Whisper Flow or Cursor’s built-in dictation knows voice already saves typing time. This is the same idea applied to the visual half of the problem, the part voice alone never touched. Think about the last time you tried to describe a layout bug in text: three sentences to explain where the button sits relative to the sidebar, and the model still asks a clarifying question because your description didn’t quite land. That gap is what this closes.
What’s new
The pitch is simple. Hit record, point at whatever you mean (a UI element, a specific function, a database schema, an AWS or Vercel config panel), draw a box or arrow on it, and narrate the fix out loud while you do it. The clip goes to Claude, Cursor, or Codex as context, read the way an agent reads a pasted screenshot, not the way it chokes on a full video file. No more numbering your screenshots 1 through 4 and writing “see image 2, the dropdown near the top” just to keep the context straight.
The twist
Here’s the part that got me. You’d assume this is just a video attachment with extra steps, and video is exactly what Claude, Cursor, and Codex block from chat because it burns through tokens fast, sometimes hundreds of thousands for a thirty-second clip. The poster says that’s the whole reason the tool exists: it’s built to compress a screen recording down to something closer to screenshot-level token cost, while still carrying the pointing, drawing, and voice narration a raw video would need. So it looks like screen recording, but it’s engineered to dodge the exact tax that made screen recording useless for agents in the first place. That’s the leverage: you get video-grade context for image-grade cost, which is the tradeoff every agent tool has been quietly avoiding until now.
How people are actually running it
- 🎥 Record the screen, then point straight at the piece you’re talking about, a component, a function, a config file
- Draw the box, circle, or arrow while you explain the change out loud, no need to script it, just talk like you’re pointing something out to a coworker
- Show the database schema or the AWS/Vercel/Cloudflare panel if the fix touches infrastructure, since those are exactly the screens that are painful to describe in words
- Drag the clip into your agent chat the same way you’d drop in a screenshot
- 💬 Let the agent read the pointing and the narration together instead of guessing from a text description, which cuts out a full round of back-and-forth clarifying questions
Pro tips
- Planning mode: after your agent hands you a multi-step plan, record yourself circling the parts of the diagram or flowchart that actually need to change before you commit to it. Saves you from approving a plan you only half agreed with.
- This isn’t just for developers. One commenter in the thread does fitness coaching, not code, and wants the same record-draw-narrate setup for walking clients through exercise form, pointing at the knee angle instead of writing a paragraph about it.
- Designers iterating on mockups in Claude or Codex can point at the one pixel that’s wrong and say it out loud instead of writing a paragraph the model still half-misreads. “That spacing, right there” beats three sentences of coordinates every time.
- Project managers on Linear, Jira, or Monday can record a ticket, drag in the reference assets, and narrate the technical ask in one pass instead of writing a spec nobody reads twice, then hand the same clip to engineering without retyping any of it.
None of this replaces typing out a clean spec when one exists. But for the “I can’t explain this bug in words” moments, pointing at the screen beats writing three paragraphs every time, and it means your agent starts fixing the actual problem instead of the problem you managed to describe.
Go read the thread if you’ve ever burned ten minutes captioning a screenshot just to get an agent to understand a five-second thought. Worth it! 🚀
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How long is the learning curve if you’re switching from typing prompts?
Honestly, most people get comfortable in a few sessions. It’s not hard to learn, just getting used to holding your camera angle steady and speaking clearly so it picks up your gestures. If you’ve used Siri or Alexa, it’ll feel pretty natural right away.
Q: Can non-developers use this?
Absolutely. Fitness trainers are already using it to show clients exercise form, designers are pointing out mockup changes, and project managers are detailing tasks in Linear or Jira. If your job involves pointing at something visual and explaining it, this works for you.
Q: How much real-world time does this actually save?
For developers, it’s a huge time collapse. Right now you screenshot, draw boxes, type it out, then explain again in chat. With this, you just point, draw, and talk, one flow, no stopping. Same speed boost for designers iterating on mockups.
Are voice prompting the thing now?
by u/Different_Scholar_74 in PromptEngineering