Krzysztof Kowalczyk • 6/20/2026

Letting AI agents drive a GUI app with -dbg-control

This article describes a technique for enabling AI agents to control a Windows GUI application (SumatraPDF) deterministically. Instead of relying on flaky mouse clicks and screenshots, the author adds a -dbg-control command-line flag that opens a named pipe. A background thread listens for binary requests, allowing agents to call internal functions like text search or translation directly. The approach is faster and more reliable than traditional GUI automation, and is implemented in C++ with a TypeScript test client.

0 comments

#debugging #c #Named Pipes