Help / Setup

Setup

Last updated 2026-10-01

Cue draws its guidance on your screen, but the reasoning comes from an AI command-line tool you already use. Cue is sandboxed and never starts that tool itself. A small companion program, cue-bridge, runs it for each request you make. You download the bridge here and start it once.

What you need

  • A Mac with Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later, and Cue from the Mac App Store.
  • An AI CLI installed and signed in, for example Claude Code. That tool and its account or subscription are separate from Cue and are not included with it.
  • About 2.5 GB of free disk space for Cue's on-device AR model.

Download the bridge

Cue 1.0.0 (build 2):

The bridge is signed with Karma Digital's Developer ID and notarized by Apple. Your browser marks the download as coming from the internet; that is expected and the bridge starts normally. Do not remove that mark or change Gatekeeper settings.

Install and start it

The simplest way: in Cue's menu-bar menu choose AI assistant instructions (copy) and paste the instructions into your AI CLI, along with the folder where you downloaded the zip. It can do the steps below for you. SETUP.md inside the zip has the complete reference.

To do it yourself, in Terminal, in the folder holding the download:

shasum -a 256 -c cue-bridge-1.0.0-b2.zip.sha256
ditto -x -k cue-bridge-1.0.0-b2.zip .
BRIDGE_HOME="$HOME/Library/Application Support/cue-bridge"
mkdir -p "$BRIDGE_HOME"
ditto cue-bridge-1.0.0-b2/cue-bridge "$BRIDGE_HOME/cue-bridge"
cp cue-bridge-1.0.0-b2/bridge-config.example.json "$BRIDGE_HOME/bridge-config.json"

Edit bridge-config.json so executablePath is the absolute path of your CLI (for Claude Code, the output of command -v claude). The example already carries Claude Code's arguments. Then start the bridge and leave it running:

SOCK="$HOME/Library/Group Containers/XXBZ4JQXQH.cue/b.sock"
cd "$BRIDGE_HOME"
nohup ./cue-bridge --config bridge-config.json --socket "$SOCK" >> bridge.log 2>&1 &
echo $! > cue-bridge.pid

The bridge does not start at login. After a restart, run the last block again.

First run

  • Open Cue. It lives in the menu bar.
  • macOS asks for two permissions: Screen Recording, so Cue can see the screen it annotates, and Accessibility, for Cue's keyboard shortcuts. Allow both in System Settings, Privacy & Security.
  • On first launch Cue downloads its AR model (about 2.3 GB) from Hugging Face. The menu shows the progress.

Try it

With System Settings open, press ⌥ ↓ (Option and Down Arrow), type “Where do I change the wallpaper?” and press Shift+Enter. Cue shows a card with the answer. Ask it to point things out and it highlights them on screen. ⌥ ↑ starts a step-by-step task, ⌥ → moves to the next step and ⌥ Space stops or clears.

Help

If a shortcut shows the setup card instead of the text box, the bridge is not running: start it again. More at Support.