Please Click Allow

The pitch for bigarrow is that your AI agent can refactor a monorepo, write a migration, and explain monads, but when it needs you to click one button, it types “please click Allow in the dialog” into a terminal you aren’t looking at. So someone built it a finger. You run bigarrow point --element "Allow" --text "Franz, click Allow", and a large friendly arrow with a sign appears over everything, points at the button, and fades away on its own. It’s click-through, it never steals focus, and it needs no permissions to draw. The README adds, with a straight face, that there’s no AI inside, “we checked twice.”

I love this, and not only for the joke about Paleolithic arrows. Look at the arrangement. For decades the arrow on the screen was software pointing a human toward the thing they were supposed to do. Then we spent years teaching software to do the clicking for us. Now the software has hit the one click it isn’t allowed to make, the security prompt, which exists precisely because a machine shouldn’t be able to approve itself. So the human has become the actuator, and the machine’s remaining job is to get our attention without being rude about it.

There’s a quiet design lesson in how small it is. One binary, no daemon, no menu-bar icon, no account. It does one thing a person would do by leaning over your shoulder and tapping the glass.

I’d like to know whether Franz clicks faster when the arrow is bigger. Somebody has surely measured that for pointing at things in the Paleolithic.

Also today: Deno is joining Cloudflare, which is a bigger story and not mine to tell.