Clarity

Clarity is a macOS menu-bar app that explains any problem on your screen. Press ⌘⇧E, drag a box around a problem in any application, type what is confusing you, and press Enter. A floating window shows a step-by-step written explanation within seconds. About a minute later, an animation generated for that exact problem plays in the same window: a model writes Manim code for it, and a sandbox renders it. Built by four people at HackCMU over 11 and 12 September 2026. Adam Zhu built the desktop app and installer.

How it works

  1. Capture: the desktop app (Python, pywebview) takes a region screenshot and posts it with the question to a Go coordinator, which opens a job.
  2. Read: an Intake agent has Gemini transcribe the problem verbatim at temperature 0.
  3. Cache: the problem text, question and mode are hashed and checked in MongoDB Atlas. The same problem is never rendered twice.
  4. Explain: an Explainer agent drafts a step-by-step explanation and a storyboard, critiques it against a rubric and revises once. The explanation shows immediately.
  5. Animate: a Manim Generator agent retrieves verified Manim examples from a vector store, has Claude write one continuous Manim script, lints it, renders it in a network-isolated Docker container, and repairs it from the traceback up to three times. The MP4 is stored in S3 and plays in the result window.

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