What Component Work is Component Work is a framework Kieran explores on this channel for doing experiments and intellectual work in a stand-alone product — deliberately separate from component engineering, though designed so it could also work together with Compound Engineering.[^edd078ec@167][^edd078ec@2953] The problem it targets The core challenge is getting a quality signal: capturing the moments when a user says something important or has an experience worth recording.[^edd078ec@213] The existing Refract package records clicks and DOM elements, but not in real time.[^edd078ec@230] Component Work's answer is to combine screen capture with OpenAI's live audio API, so you can react to a website the way you'd talk to a colleague — pointing, drawing, annotating, and simply speaking.[^edd078ec@251] How the workflow unfolds 1. Look and react — click elements and draw on the page in real time so the agent can start working immediately.[^edd078ec@261] 2. Record everything — continuous screen capture with periodic screenshots, plus structured event and DOM data; video is too heavy, but color changes and drawing must stay visible to the agent.[^edd078ec@1417] 3. Bundle and send — annotations and clicks go to the agent together, with a stream contract as the new public API replacing the old ZIP-based scheme.[^edd078ec@530][^edd078ec@1230] 4. The agent acts — waking in one of three modes: instant mode, smart mode, or do nothing mode, matched to the phase of work.[^edd078ec@619] Live polish as the target scenario The target is the polishing phase, when the AI has already done the work and you're refining it — seeing the result in front of you and just saying “move this, do it better, can you suggest a few options?”.[^edd078ec@804] A live mode lets you talk to the site like a human while it fixes things in the background, backed by a lightweight web server that streams information from any website into the agent.[^edd078ec@826][^edd078ec@1038] A guiding instinct from the session: AI is often conservative, so talk about what you'd do if this were a year-long project, then zoom in from that big picture — that's how you surface abstractions like this should be a library, not a script.[^edd078ec@1095] - Component Work is an experimental framework for intellectual work, separate from but connectable to Compound Engineering.- The hardest part of AI collaboration is capturing a quality signal from real user experience.- Real-time audio plus screen capture (screenshots, clicks, DOM data, drawing) gives the agent rich, immediate context.- A stream contract replaces ZIP packaging as the public API between browser and agent.- The agent wakes up in one of three modes — instant, smart, or do nothing — matched to the phase of work.