cenno · un cenno

agents ask.
you answer.

A macOS menu-bar app that lets AI agents ask you questions through small floating panels — without stealing your focus.

the problem

Agents are blind to you

They guess instead of asking.
Or they block a terminal you're not watching.
Or they interrupt and steal your keyboard.

There was no polite way for an agent to reach a human.

the interaction

One small sign

The agent calls ask_user over MCP. A non-activating panel slides in. You glance, tap or type, and the agent gets {answer, via, elapsed_s} — structured data, not parsed text.

Fare un cenno — Italian: to give a small sign, a nod.

vocabulary

Ask anything

choice
pick one of N

scale
a 1–7 rating

confirm
yes / no

text · voice
type or dictate

ask_sequence
multi-step in one panel

custom widgets
A2UI layouts

sound-out

It can speak, too

Reads the prompt aloud when you're not looking.
On-device neural voice (Supertonic) — 10 styles, male & female.
Urgency-gated. Off by default; one switch to enable.

iPhone & Apple Watch · in testing

Answer from your wrist

Prompts route to your phone or Watch when you step away.
Through your private iCloud — the developer never sees them.
Per-device: off · fallback · mirror. Second-screen ambient mode.

yours, locally

Local-first by default

Every exchange stored in a local SQLite DB you own.
cenno export to JSON/CSV anytime.
Free & open source · Apache-2.0 · signed & notarized.

Try it

brew install --cask glebis/tap/cenno

cenno.salient.community · github.com/glebis/cenno

agents ask.you answer.