Vy by Vercept
At Vercept, I designed and built the windows people used to give an AI control of their computer, follow its progress, and step in when needed.
- Team
- — Small startup (8-15 people)
- Industry
- — AI, Computer vision
- Website
- — vercept.com
Tools & technologies
The Problem
Delegating a desktop task meant giving up visibility and control.
The approach
How the work took shape
Start with trust
Vy could see the desktop and act on it. The harder question was how comfortable people would feel letting it work. I explored voice, chat, and different ways of showing progress. Feedback from the Discord community kept pointing to the same need: people wanted to see what the assistant was doing and be able to stop it.
Two windows, two ways to work
That led to a main window for setting up tasks and managing workflows, and a compact window for watching work in progress. I designed and built both. People could keep several tasks running while choosing how much space Vy occupied on their desktop.
Keep every task accountable
Parallel tasks brought a new problem: each needed its own conversation, status, and controls. I built the session layer with Combine and async/await so updates stayed independent without blocking the interface. Window targeting, frame differencing, and a capture budget below 100ms supported the vision pipeline underneath.
The hard parts
The constraint
A full control panel took up the screen people were trying to use.
The decision
I split setup and monitoring across a resizable main window and a compact view, with a persistent sidebar connecting them.
The constraint
Several tasks could be running, each at a different stage.
The decision
I gave each stream its own state and controls, then used reactive updates to keep the sidebar and windows in sync.
Core Interface Focus Areas
Left sidebar
Active, scheduled, and completed tasks sit alongside search and saved workflows, so people can find a task and see where it stands.
Main input view
The main window brings the prompt, screen context, workflows, and execution controls together before a task begins.
Compact running view
Progress and essential controls stay visible while the rest of the desktop remains available.
Final design
The outcome
What changed
The result
- ✓Shipped concurrent background tasks and multiple iterations of the main and compact windows.
- ✓Expanded navigation to support workflows, schedules, experts, and blueprints.
- ✓The releases were followed by more positive Discord feedback and additional downloads.
- ✓Anthropic acquired Vercept on February 25, 2026. This was a company milestone, separate from my individual contributions.
Looking back
The design decisions that mattered most concerned what people could see and interrupt. A convincing demo was only the beginning of that work.
As features changed, a clear model for tasks and states proved more useful than polishing individual screens in isolation.
Where I contributed
Product
- Used research and Discord feedback to set priorities.
- Defined when people needed a full workspace and when they needed a small monitor.
Design
- Designed task navigation, prompting, progress, and intervention across both windows.
Engineering
- Built the sidebar and concurrent task streaming with independent state for each task.
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