phone-mirroring-pulling-news

Claude Code reads your feeds so you don't have to.

Drives macOS iPhone Mirroring, scrolls a feed app, screenshots as it goes, and hands back a digest: what happened, what actually matters to you, what was noise.

Anything with a public feed (Hacker News, RSS, Reddit) is fetched as text at near-zero cost. Mirroring is reserved for closed apps that have no feed — the X app timeline, Instagram, TikTok.

┌──────────────┐   scroll    ┌──────────────────┐  screencapture  ┌────────────┐
│  mirrorctl   │ ──────────► │ iPhone Mirroring │ ───────────────►│  frames/   │
│  (Swift/CGEvent)           │     window       │                 └─────┬──────┘
└──────────────┘             └──────────────────┘                       │
                                                                        ▼
       feeds.mjs (HN / RSS / Reddit, text)  ─────────────►  Claude reads  ─────► digest.md
                                                                        │
                                                          Obsidian vault + push notify

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What it is not

Honest limits, up front:

• Not a live stream. Claude sees sampled still frames, not video. TikTok/IG are understood at caption-and-thumbnail level — no audio, no motion.
• Not unattended. The iPhone must be locked, idle, and nearby; mirroring pauses the instant you pick the phone up. The Mac must be awake and unlocked.
• Not free. Every frame is a vision-token cost. Downscaling and dedupe keep it around ~600 tokens/frame, so a 60-frame run is ~35k tokens. The feeds path costs effectively nothing — prefer it.
• Not an engagement bot. It scrolls and reads. There is no like, follow, comment, or DM verb anywhere in the profile schema, and mirrorctl refuses to post events unless iPhone Mirroring is the frontmost window.
• DRM video (Netflix and friends) captures as a black rectangle.

Automating social apps sits outside their terms of service. This is built for one person reading their own feed at human pace. Keep it that way.

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Requirements

Thing	Why
macOS 15+ with iPhone Mirroring	the whole premise (built and tested on macOS 26)
iPhone on the same Apple Account, Bluetooth + Wi-Fi on	mirroring handshake
/usr/bin/swift (Xcode Command Line Tools)	compiles mirrorctl, no other install
Node 20+	the capture loop and feed fetchers, zero dependencies
Screen Recording permission for your terminal	screencapture of the mirror window
Accessibility permission for your terminal	posting scroll/tap events

Grant both under System Settings → Privacy & Security. macOS will prompt on first use; you must restart the terminal afterwards for it to take effect.

Setup

git clone https://github.com/mattypark/phone-mirroring-pulling-news.git
cd phone-mirroring-pulling-news
./scripts/build.sh          # swiftc bin/mirrorctl.swift -o bin/mirrorctl

Use

Open iPhone Mirroring, leave the phone face down and locked, then:

bin/mirrorctl winid                 # preflight: is the mirror window there?
node scripts/capture.mjs --profile x --minutes 5
node scripts/feeds.mjs --profile news

Or from Claude Code, which does the reading and the writing too:

/doomscroll x 5m
/doomscroll news
/doomscroll all

Digests land in ~/Documents/ObsidianVault/Digests/YYYY-MM-DD-<profile>.md, with a copy in digests/, and a push notification when the run finishes. Set VAULT_DIGEST_DIR to file them somewhere else.

The slash command and skill live in claude/ — symlink them in:

ln -s "$PWD/claude/skills/doomscroll" ~/.claude/skills/doomscroll
ln -s "$PWD/claude/commands/doomscroll.md" ~/.claude/commands/doomscroll.md

Layout

bin/mirrorctl.swift      window lookup, screenshot, scroll, tap, swipe — the only native code
scripts/build.sh         one-line compile
scripts/capture.mjs      capture loop: shot → downscale → dedupe → scroll → repeat
scripts/feeds.mjs        text path: HN, RSS, Reddit JSON — no mirroring, no vision tokens
scripts/digest-write.mjs markdown out to the vault + notification
scripts/lib/             image fingerprinting, profile validation, XML, a tiny PNG encoder
prompts/                 what the model is told when it reads frames and builds the digest
profiles/*.json          per-app scroll cadence, stop rules, allowed actions
profiles/schema.json     what a profile is allowed to contain
claude/                  the /doomscroll command and skill, for Claude Code
runs/<timestamp>/        frames + manifest.json (gitignored — never leaves the machine)

How the pieces divide

The deterministic half is code: which app, how fast to scroll, when to stop, which frames are worth keeping, what the markdown looks like, where the file goes. The judgement half is the model: what a post actually claims, whether it matters, what to drop. Keeping the line there means the digest has the same shape every day even though its contents are written fresh — and a bad run fails in an obvious, mechanical way instead of a plausible-sounding one.

Privacy

Frames are screenshots of a personal phone. They stay in runs/, which is gitignored and never uploaded anywhere. The capture loop blanks the top strip of every frame so notification banners don't get recorded, and aborts the run on sight of a login, 2FA, or payment screen.

A group-chat profile (Discord, Slack, iMessage) is deliberately not included — those frames contain other people's messages and need their own retention rules.