FOR ONBOARDING
Turn Onboarding into Recordings Your Team and Its AI Can Search
An agent-readable screen recording turns tribal knowledge into onboarding that stays current. Record the process once instead of writing a doc that goes stale — new hires watch it, and their AI answers “wait, how do I do X” from the transcript, pointed at the exact moment.
The whole loop in under a minute. Tap for sound.
One recorder, every workflow
Clipy is for every use case
Same loop, whatever your team does: record once, share one link, and an AI agent reads it and acts. Switch roles to see it play out.
Agent-ready fast
Chunks stream to the server while you record, so the moment you stop the summary, key-moment frames, and transcript are already building — a short clip is agent-ready in seconds.
Our own pipeline
On-device transcription and key-moment fusion we built ourselves — not a third-party API bolted on — tuned for speed and for the exact context an agent needs to act.
Fastest agent loop
The fastest agent-ready screen recorder: one link a teammate watches and an AI agent reads. No ticket, no repro write-up, no re-explaining.
The onboarding doc is stale the day it’s written
Nobody wants to write onboarding docs, because writing the doc costs more than doing the task again. So the real setup lives in one senior engineer’s head — the env var that isn’t in the README, why you never run migrations against staging, the deploy dance nobody wrote down. The new hire hits the gap, pings that person in Slack, and waits while they context-switch out of their own work to answer a question they’ve answered four times this quarter. And the doc that does exist is six months out of date, missing the one step that actually breaks — which is exactly why nobody trusts it, and why nobody keeps it current.
How it works
- 1
Record the process once
Do the task and narrate it — the setup, the gotchas, the why. No doc to write.
- 2
New hires watch and ask
The link is a searchable artifact; their agent answers follow-ups from the transcript with a timestamp.
- 3
Update by re-recording
When the flow changes, record it again — a one-minute re-record beats editing a stale doc.
Capture the how and the why in one take
A doc captures steps. It almost never captures the reasoning — the offhand “we don’t do it that way anymore, it corrupted the staging DB last spring” that lives only in the head of whoever’s done it before. That context is the actual value of onboarding, and it’s the first thing writing drops.
An agent-readable screen recording keeps both. Do the task on screen and narrate it — the setup, the gotcha, the why — and Clipy turns that one pass into structured context: an AI summary, key moments (a timestamped frame of each thing you clicked or pointed at, with real click coordinates on Mac-app and Chrome-extension recordings), and the full transcript. The new hire watches the actual flow instead of reconstructing it from a list, and the reasoning you said out loud is captured with it.
The why, not just the steps
The reason you skip a step or run it in a certain order is in your narration — the thing a bullet list leaves on the floor.
The real screen, in order
Key moments capture each click with its frame, so a new hire sees the exact panel and button, not a screenshot staged afterward to match a doc.
Showing beats describing
You record the task you were going to do anyway instead of stopping to write it up, so the knowledge actually gets captured this time.
The transcript is a knowledge base new hires can search
A recording isn’t just a video to sit through — it’s a document. The summary, the timestamped transcript, and the key moments are structured for agents, so a new hire doesn’t scrub a 20-minute walkthrough hunting for the one part they need.
They ask their AI instead. “How do I get staging access” resolves to the moment in the recording where it was shown, with the timestamp, straight from the transcript — no ping to the senior engineer, no waiting. Keep the recordings in a shared library and it compounds: an agent with library access through the Clipy MCP server can answer across every onboarding recording at once, so “how do we run a migration” finds the answer wherever it was explained.
Answers, not scrubbing
“Where did you set up the env file” comes back with the timestamp from the transcript, so the new hire jumps to the moment instead of rewatching.
The senior engineer stops being the search index
The question that used to interrupt someone’s afternoon is answered by the recording’s AI, from what they already explained on camera once.
A library, not one clip
Private recordings are reachable by an agent through the Clipy MCP server, so a new hire’s AI can search the whole onboarding library, not just the clip they were handed.
Keep it current by re-recording, not re-editing
Docs rot because keeping them current is a chore nobody owns — you’d have to find the stale step, re-shoot the screenshot, and reword the paragraph around it, for every screen that moved. So it doesn’t happen, and the doc quietly becomes a trap.
A recording updates differently. When the deploy flow changes or a screen moves, you record the new version in a minute — the same task you’d do anyway — and the fresh walkthrough, transcript, and frames replace the old one. Updating is doing the task on camera once, not maintaining prose, which is the whole reason recordings stay current where docs go stale.
Updating is one more take
A changed flow is a one-minute re-record, not an afternoon of patching screenshots and rewording the steps around them.
No stale-screenshot traps
The frames come from the recording itself, so they can’t drift out of sync with the UI the way a doc’s hand-pasted images do.
Current enough to trust
Because keeping it fresh is cheap, the onboarding library stays accurate — the reason new hires use it instead of pinging around it.
One recording retires the “how do I set up my dev env” Slack thread
A backend team lead is onboarding a new hire and, instead of updating the dev-env doc nobody trusts, records the setup once: cloning the repo, the DATABASE_URL that isn’t in the README, why migrations run against a local Postgres and never staging, and the one brew dependency everyone forgets. Chunks stream while she records, so within seconds of hitting stop the clip is agent-ready and resolves to its document. She drops the link into the onboarding checklist. Two weeks later a second hire starts, hits “wait, where does DATABASE_URL come from,” and asks their AI instead of pinging her — it answers from the transcript and points at the 4:12 mark where she set it. When the team moves the local DB from brew to Docker a month on, she re-records the setup in a minute and swaps the link, and the checklist is current again.
The why survives the handoff
Narration captures the reasoning behind each step — the gotcha, the “don’t do it that way” — that a step-by-step doc always drops, so new hires get the context, not just the clicks.
New hires self-serve the answer
The transcript is agent-readable, so “how do I get staging access” is answered by their AI with a timestamp instead of interrupting the one person who knows.
Current because updating is cheap
When a flow changes, a one-minute re-record replaces the walkthrough, transcript, and frames — so the onboarding library stays accurate instead of rotting into a trap.
Agent-ready in seconds
Chunks stream while you record, so a short walkthrough is readable the moment you stop. It’s the fastest agent-ready screen recorder — no render wait before the recording is a searchable artifact.
Onboarding, before and after
| The old way | With an agent-readable recording | |
|---|---|---|
| Documenting a setup | Write a doc that costs more than doing the task, so it never gets written well. | Record the task once as you do it; the walkthrough, transcript, and frames are the doc. |
| The gotcha and the why | Lives in one senior engineer’s head, retold in Slack on request. | Captured in the narration and searchable in the transcript for every new hire. |
| A new hire’s question | Pings the person who knows and waits for a context-switch. | Their AI answers from the transcript with the timestamp, no interruption. |
| When the flow changes | Hunt for the stale step and re-shoot every screenshot — so nobody does. | Re-record the task in a minute; the walkthrough and frames regenerate. |
| Searching past onboarding | Grep a wiki of half-true docs, then ask a human anyway. | An agent searches the whole recording library through the Clipy MCP server. |
Common questions
How do I document an onboarding process without writing a doc?
Record the task instead of writing it up. Do the setup or flow on screen once and narrate it, and an agent-readable screen recording turns that pass into a document — an AI summary, key moments with frames, and a timestamped transcript. New hires watch the real thing, and the recording is the artifact, so there’s no doc to author or maintain.
Why do onboarding docs go stale so fast?
Because keeping them current is a chore nobody owns — every moved screen means finding the stale step, re-shooting the screenshot, and rewording the paragraph around it. A recording flips that: when the flow changes you re-record the task in a minute, and the walkthrough, transcript, and frames regenerate. Updating is doing the task on camera once, not maintaining prose, which is why recordings stay accurate where docs rot.
Can a new hire’s AI answer questions from a screen recording?
Yes. The transcript, summary, and key moments are structured for agents, so a question like “how do I get staging access” resolves to the moment in the recording where it was shown, with the timestamp. The new hire asks their AI instead of scrubbing the video or pinging the person who recorded it.
What’s the best way to capture tribal knowledge from senior engineers?
Have them do the task on camera and talk through it, rather than write it down. The reasoning that never makes it into a doc — the gotcha, the “we don’t do it that way anymore because it broke staging” — lives in the narration, and an agent-readable screen recording keeps it in the searchable transcript. It costs the senior engineer one take of a task they were doing anyway.
How do I keep onboarding recordings current when the process changes?
Re-record the changed flow — it’s a one-minute pass of the same task, not a doc edit. The new walkthrough, transcript, and frames replace the old ones, and because the frames come from the recording itself they can’t drift out of sync with the UI the way hand-pasted screenshots do. Swap the link in your checklist and the onboarding stays current.
Where should onboarding recordings live?
Each recording is a share link, so keep them where onboarding already lives — the wiki, the onboarding checklist, or a shared library. For a whole library an agent can search, private recordings are reachable through the Clipy MCP server, so a new hire’s AI can answer across every onboarding recording, not just the one they were sent.
How fast is a recording ready to hand a new hire?
Chunks stream to the server while you record, so a short walkthrough is agent-ready within seconds of hitting stop — best case under about ten seconds for a short clip. It’s the fastest agent-ready screen recorder: you record the task and the link is a searchable artifact by the time you’ve stopped, with no render step to wait through.
Which agents can read the onboarding recordings?
Any agent that can read a Clipy link — Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex through the Clipy skill, or any MCP client via @clipy/mcp. Public links resolve to a plain markdown document plus frames with no API key; private onboarding recordings use the Clipy MCP server with a personal key. Recording, links, transcripts, summaries, and key moments are all free.