Questions and answers.
What Ansight is, how agents use it, what stays on your machine, and how to get access.
01 Product
What is Ansight?
Ansight is an SDK that runs inside your mobile app, a resident host on your machine, and a CLI. The SDK streams runtime evidence to the host: screenshots, UI trees, touches, logs, network requests, telemetry, app events, metrics, app state, files, databases, and artifacts. Your coding agent reads that evidence through structured ansight commands, and people review it in a browser-based local player.
How is this different from a screen recording or an agent-driven UI test?
A recording shows you pixels. A pass or fail tells you the agent reached the end. Ansight gives the agent the runtime evidence to prove the app did the right thing, the right way, at the right speed: what was rendered, what was tapped, what the app logged and requested, how memory and frame rate behaved, and what state was written. That evidence is what lets an agent verify its own work instead of guessing.
How Ansight compares with agent-device, Momentic, Maestro, and othersWhich mobile frameworks are supported?
.NET MAUI on iOS, Android, and Mac Catalyst; native iOS with SwiftUI and UIKit; native Android with Jetpack Compose; React Native and Expo development builds; Flutter; and the Cordova-family Capacitor bridge, currently targeting Capacitor 8. All SDKs are in beta, and each ships framework-aware UI inspection alongside the native visual tree.
Can I use it in debug and release builds, on simulators and physical devices?
Yes. Ansight works on simulators, emulators, and physical devices. Keep enrollment and remote tooling behind a developer-only guard in development or QA variants, and do not ship the development connection in production builds.
02 Agents
Which coding agents work with Ansight?
Any agent that can run a shell command. Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and plain CI jobs all call the same ansight commands and read the same versioned JSON output. There is no separate client to integrate.
Does Ansight need an MCP server?
No. The resident host does not expose an MCP listener. Agents run ansight commands with --json, and a published set of skills teaches them which commands to use for installing the SDK, inspecting a live app, investigating a session, and running workspace automation.
Can I control what an agent sees?
Yes. An agent only receives what it asks the CLI for, and you shape the source. Extract a time range from a session, run a sanitized export with the built-in PII policy or your own sanitizer module, and keep secret values in the operating-system vault so they never appear in workspace files. The app can still log sensitive content, so review captures before sharing them.
03 Workspace and testing
What lives in an Ansight workspace?
A source-controlled ansight/ folder beside your app. It holds tests, which are JSON scenarios a bounded agent runs and verifies through evidence; tasks, which are deterministic TypeScript workflows with named checks; triggers, which snapshot app state when a chosen event fires; Trends, which are performance checks with acceptable ranges; sanitizers; and schemas. Engineers and agents share one definition of how the app is checked.
Can I run the test suite before every release, including in CI?
Yes. Run one test or the whole suite headlessly with ansight test run-all . --headless --json. Each run records the evidence it verified against, so a failing release check comes with screenshots, logs, and network traffic attached, not just a red mark.
Can Ansight catch performance regressions?
Yes. A Trends check watches a window bounded by two events your app already emits, such as login started and login completed, and measures memory, frame rate, or any custom metric inside it. You set an acceptable range for each metric, and Ansight also compares every run against a baseline built from comparable runs. The check evaluates automatically when a session ends, so you know the moment the app underperforms.
How does a tester hand a bug to an engineer?
Every session is recorded. When a tester hits a bug, the local player shows the timeline with screenshots, touches, logs, and telemetry. They export the session as a portable archive, sanitize it if needed, or share it to Ansight Cloud. The engineer, or their agent, reproduces from the same evidence and watches what actually happened before changing code.
04 Data and security
Does my data leave my machine?
Not by default. The SDK talks to the host over your local network, and captures are stored as ordinary files on your machine. Data leaves only through explicit actions: a ZIP export, a sanitized export, sharing a session to Ansight Cloud, uploading Trends history, tracking test runs in the portal, or running hosted workspace tests.
How is pairing secured?
The CLI issues a short-lived, one-use QR invite. The app scans it, registers its installation ID, and stores the returned token for later reconnects. The development transport is clear-text UDP and WebSocket, so it does not encrypt traffic or authenticate the network path. Treat the QR as a credential and use Ansight only on a trusted development or QA network.
How do I pair a device?
Run ansight pairing issue <app-id> --qr, or start the host with ansight host run --pair <app-id>, then scan the terminal QR from the app's developer-only pairing screen.
05 Access
Do I need an account?
The host starts, reports status, and stops without signing in. Product features check for active product access, so sign in once with ansight account login. Cloud storage, sharing, and hosted computation also need the matching account entitlement.
What does it cost?
Ansight is in beta and pricing has not been announced. Install the CLI, connect a development build, and use it while we finish the product. Pricing will be published before general availability.
Is the SDK open source?
The SDK source is published on GitHub under the Ansight SDK Source-Available License, so you can read and audit everything that runs inside your app. The CLI package includes the resident host and the local player.
Can I export sessions?
Yes. Package any session into a portable archive, produce a sanitized copy, import an archive on another machine, or share it to Ansight Cloud for a team, signed-in, or public audience. Attach the archive to a ticket or a pull request as the evidence behind a change.
Still have a question?
Read the docs, or install the CLI and ask your agent.