// the find
software-mansion/argent
An agentic toolkit to control, debug, and profile iOS and Android apps. Made by Software Mansion.
Argent gives an AI coding agent (via MCP) live control over iOS simulators, Android emulators/devices, TVs, and Electron/Chromium apps — tapping, swiping, profiling, and diffing screens through a CLI instead of the developer doing it by hand. It's aimed at teams who want their AI assistant to actually reproduce bugs and run visual/perf checks against a real running app, not just read code.
It wires into real tooling instead of reinventing it — Xcode Instruments, Perfetto, Hermes, and React DevTools for profiling, so you get real profiler output rather than an approximation. Platform coverage is unusually wide for one CLI: iOS, Android, three TV platforms, and Electron/Chromium, plus deterministic flow recording/replay for repro cases. The monorepo is well-tested — every package (cli, mcp server, installer, tools-client) ships its own vitest suite, and CI covers lint, format, knip, and e2e across Windows, Wayland, and physical iOS device runners. It's built by Software Mansion, who are React Native core contributors, so it's more likely to track RN internals correctly than a third-party wrapper.
The parts that actually drive the simulators — simulator-server, ax-service, and the iOS native devtools .dylib — are proprietary binaries, not Apache 2.0 like the rest of the repo; you can't audit, rebuild, or redistribute them, which is a real blocker for anyone with a closed-source-in-toolchain policy. Telemetry is on by default (opt-out via a separate command), easy to miss when dropping this into a shared or CI environment. The README doesn't explain how the MCP tool calls map to the platform-specific backends — that architecture only exists in the external docs site, so you're evaluating a black box until you dig further. The workflow list (sync-next-tag, tool/skill-description-quality checks) suggests the MCP tool surface is still actively shifting release to release, so pin a version if you're depending on specific tool names.