Built-in App Playbooks
For some common macOS apps, generic "click here, type there" is the slow path. Ghast ships dedicated adapters — playbooks — that turn a multi-step UI flow into a single deterministic tool call with parameters.
This page lists what's bundled today. Coverage is intentionally narrow: each playbook is hand-built and tested, not auto-generated.
Productivity
Calendar (com.apple.Calendar)
create_event— Generates an ICS file and dispatches it. Supportsdry_runfor validation. Requiresallow_calendar_write=trueafter first user approval.
Mail (com.apple.mail)
compose— Open a new compose window pre-filled.compose_draft— Like compose, but via themailto:URL scheme — works even when Mail is not the default handler.send_dry_run— Validate that a compose would succeed without sending.
Notes (com.apple.Notes)
open_note_url— Open a specific note via thenotes://URL scheme.search_dry_run— Validate a search query against the Notes index without surfacing results into the UI.
Finder (com.apple.finder)
reveal— File-level adapter: reveal a path in Finder, scrolled into view.open_folder— Open a folder in a new Finder window.
Safari (com.apple.Safari)
open_url— Open a URL in Safari. (Generic UI click also works; this is faster and more reliable.)
Music
Four music apps have dedicated playbooks for play / pause / next / previous via menubar AX (so playback stays correct even when the app is in the background):
- QQ Music (
com.tencent.QQMusicMac) —play_pause,previous_track,next_track,like_current_track - NetEase Cloud Music (
com.netease.163music) —play_song,play_playlist,play_daily_recommendation,open_route(URL scheme) - Apple Music (
com.apple.Music) —open_url - Spotify (
com.spotify.client) —play_uri
Messaging
- WeChat (
com.tencent.xinWeChat) —launch - Slack (
com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap) —open_channel
These are intentionally minimal — chat content goes through the dedicated messaging bridges in Ghast, not through Computer Use.
What playbooks give you
Three things that generic click/type can't match:
| Benefit | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Deterministic execution | The adapter knows the exact UI path. Hand-tested. Less likely to drift when the app updates. |
| Structured parameters | The agent passes structured arguments (title, attendees, time) instead of typing into fields one at a time. |
| Dry-run | Validate without side effects. Catches bad inputs (malformed dates, missing attendees) before they hit the app. |
What's not a playbook
Many apps you'd expect to have one don't — at the moment of writing:
- Messages, Maps, Photos, FaceTime, Reminders — generic click/type only.
- Most third-party apps — generic only.
- Browser content — use the Ghast Browser Relay extension instead.
That's by design. Adding a playbook means committing to maintaining it across app updates; the bundled set is the set we maintain.
Extending the set
You can author skills that wrap generic Computer Use calls into your own playbook-like abstractions. See Skills for the authoring model. These don't become "playbooks" in the daemon's sense, but they give you the same single-call ergonomics from the agent's perspective.