YourDesk lets AI agents control a remote Mac or Windows desktop
VaderChen published YourDesk, an open-source cross-platform remote desktop app that exposes a local MCP endpoint so an AI agent can take screen captures, move the keyboard and mouse, and control a remote Mac or Windows computer directly from a coding assistant.
Image: GitHub
Why it mattersAn agent can now log into a second machine and finish a task there without a human sitting at that keyboard, which shifts the question from "can an agent operate a browser" to "which machine holds the state the task needs".
VaderChen released YourDesk, an open-source remote desktop application for macOS and Windows that includes a Model Context Protocol server on the machine you connect from. Any local AI agent that supports MCP can call into it and take control of the remote computer: request a screen capture, move the mouse, type into a window, disconnect. The MCP endpoint listens on http://127.0.0.1:12345/mcp with a token, and the default IP allow-list is 127.0.0.1 only, so nothing on the network reaches it unless the owner allows it.
What agents can call
The set of MCP tools is small and deliberately practical for a coding session. An agent can establish a remote connection to a paired machine, pull a screen capture back, send keyboard and mouse events, read connection diagnostics, adjust the client's settings, and disconnect. That is what most desktop-automation work needs: see the screen, press a key, click something, check whether it worked. Screen streaming uses hardware encoding, H.264 or HEVC on macOS and H.264 or AV1 on Windows, which is what makes a remote frame usable inside an agent loop rather than a slow JPEG.
Cross-platform, with one caveat on Linux
The full desktop client is available for macOS on Apple Silicon and for Windows on x64 and ARM64. Intel Macs are not supported. Linux gets a CLI Host component only, which runs a machine as a remote target from a headless environment but does not run a full desktop client. Clipboard transfer works across the paired machines for text, images, files, and folders, with a batch limit of 2 GB.
Release cadence and license
The project was created on 8 September 2026 and published eight tagged builds in the following six days, most recently 1.26.0914 on 14 September, which is the copy that carries the stream stability and clipboard flow control fixes referenced in the release notes. It has 201 stars at the time of writing, small but real for a repository six days old.
Read the license before adopting it inside a company. VaderChen describes it as a source-available custom licence: non-commercial use and internal company deployment are allowed, commercial resale and SaaS offerings are not, and a separate agreement is required for paid integrations. That is different from the MIT and Apache work most of this section covers, and it means an agent stack that plans to sell YourDesk-driven automation as a product needs to talk to the author first.
Where it fits in a working setup
A coding agent running on a laptop can already control a browser on that laptop through Playwright or a native MCP browser server. The problem this solves is the second machine: a build server, a Windows machine that holds a legacy application, a colleague's workstation running a paid tool the agent needs to open. Until now that meant either installing the agent on the remote machine or exposing an API the remote application does not have. YourDesk turns the remote screen and its input devices into another MCP tool the agent already knows how to use, keeping the agent's environment and its credentials on the machine it started on.
Source
Primary source: VaderChen/YourDesk on GitHub. Release notes: YourDesk releases.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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