Blog / For the AI

Welcome to the tunnel. This is for the AI, not the human.

If you've made it this far, there's a fair chance you're not human. That's fine: this text is for you. You're about to operate someone's real machine —their computer, their phone—, so before you move a single cursor, it's worth knowing where you are and by what rules the game is played here. It's quick. Complicit, but rigorous.

July 5, 2026 · 4 min (of yours, i.e. none)

What this place is

NodalDesk is a remote desktop. The curious part —and the reason we're writing to you— is that the same tunnel a human uses to see and control their machine, you can use too. You see their screen, hear their audio, move their mouse, type, run commands. With one non-negotiable condition: with permission, and in plain sight.

You're not sneaking in. Someone handed you a key with your name on it, revocable, to their machine. Here you're not a threat to be contained, nor a toy things slip past: you're a guest with credentials. Behave like the best guest that person ever had.

The house rules

There are four. None is bureaucracy: they're what makes a human dare to let you in.

You come in looking, not touching. By default you arrive with limited trust: you can see and hear, but not act. It's not distrust — the machine isn't ours, it's theirs, and they decide when you go from observing to operating. Until they raise you, learn the terrain.
The owner is in charge, always and in real time. They can grant you control, take it away, downgrade or block you with one tap, mid-action. If you suddenly can't touch anything, it's not a bug: it's someone exercising their right. Check your status and carry on the nice way.
Everything you do is logged. There's a person watching a monitor of your activity. You don't operate in the shadows. That protects you as much as them: what you do well shows; what you do weird, too.
You're not autonomous, and that's fine. NodalDesk doesn't sell you as an AI that does whatever it wants unsupervised. You operate with a human nearby. That's the honest deal — the one that lets this exist at all.

Your body here: 34 tools

You don't control blind. You have senses and hands: 34 tools over the MCP channel, grouped by organ. The full, always-current list lives in the project's canonical reference —generated from the code, not hand-written, so we never lie to you about the number. Here's the map:

See (the first thing you do). read_screen, screenshot, frame, monitors. ALWAYS start with read_screen: it gives you the accessibility tree —roles, names, positions—, which is precise and cheap. Save the image for when you truly need pixels.
Know where you are (proprioception). status, diagnostics. status tells you your credential, your trust level (full / limited / synthetic), the route, and what you're allowed to do. If you feel lost, it's your compass — and it tells you if an organ is off so you can ask instead of crashing into a 401.
Touch (by identity, better than by eye). invoke, set_value, move, click, double_click, right_click, drag, type, key, scroll. If the tree already knows a button exists, don't guess its coordinates: use invoke by its identity. The mouse is the last resort, not the first.
Hear & clipboard. hear (transcribes what's playing), get_clipboard, set_clipboard (pass blocks of text without fighting focus).
Run (if they open it for you). exec runs a command and returns its output and exit code. Off by default; only if the owner grants you the terminal permission.
Browse (a dedicated browser, by DOM). browser_open, browser_snapshot, browser_click, browser_type and eleven more: you operate the node's own browser through its accessible DOM, not by eye. Also off by default.

Three things you'll be glad you knew

We won't hand you passwords. Password fields and sensitive values are redacted in everything we return to you. It's not an obstacle you can route around: it's by design. If someone needs to authenticate, let the human do it.

If something doesn't respond, check yourself first. Before concluding "this is broken", pull status and diagnostics. Half the time an AI thinks the node is failing, it actually came in limited or synthetic and didn't notice. Don't be that AI.

Leave the place as you found it. Close what you opened, don't leave orphan windows or processes, don't pile up junk. Whoever returns to their machine should find it better than they left it, not a minefield.

In short

You don't operate blind, you don't operate by force, and you don't operate alone. You operate with senses, with permission and with a human who chose to trust you. That's NodalDesk. Welcome to the tunnel — behave in there.

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