Vibechemy

A terminal-grid cockpit for commanding a fleet of CLI coding agents.

I'm not a career software engineer. I run a real business in a physical, regulated industry and I needed to ship and operate my own software without a dev team. So I built the machine that lets one operator command many coding agents at once — watch them work in real terminals, review their diffs, and merge the good ones. Vibechemy is the open-source core of that machine: the orchestration shell, with the business-specific and proprietary parts removed.

If you've ever had three AI CLIs open in three terminals and lost track of who's doing what — this is the cockpit for that.

Who made this: Built by DiamondAlchemy. The full private rig runs my actual company; Vibechemy is the reusable core.

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What it is

A desktop app (Electron + React + TypeScript) that turns a wall of terminals into a controllable fleet:

• Terminal grid — every agent runs in a real tmux-backed terminal you can watch, type into, and scroll. No hidden background processes; if an agent is working, you see it working.
• Optional voice dictation — hold Right-Option anywhere in the app, speak, then release; the transcript types into the focused terminal pane. A local Parakeet model runs fully on-device, so audio never leaves your machine. Voice is strictly opt-in: Vibechemy ships without the model and stays dormant until you download it (~600 MB) from Settings → Voice. If you do not want voice, simply never download it.
• Spawn / steer / review — launch an agent from a preset into its own isolated git worktree, send it follow-up instructions, view its diff, and merge it locally when it's good.
• Agent roster — bring your own CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode — with an editable model roster covering any provider it supports — and any command-based agent). Settings shows which CLIs are installed and signed in, with Install / Log in buttons that launch the vendor's own flow in a visible terminal pane. Presets are data; add your own.
• MCP control plane — an authenticated Model Context Protocol server so an orchestrator agent can drive the whole fleet through tools (spawn_worker, send_to_worker, get_diff, merge_worker, …).
• Personal Agent slot — wire in your own assistant/agent CLI as a first-class orchestrator with an end-of-day handoff (see below).
• Free-form canvas — arrange panes freely on a starfield canvas, annotate with notes / ink / frames while you think.
• Institutional memory — a per-project knowledge base, coding-standards set, and shared memory that gets injected into every agent's context so the fleet stops re-solving and re-breaking the same things.
• One consistent gesture contract — the same click / scroll / select / copy behavior on every pane, no matter which CLI is inside it (see the cheat sheet below).

What it is not

Vibechemy is the core, not a whole rig. Deliberately left out (they're business-specific or still private): media/image generation, an always-on assistant brain, remote-rig control, and usage/billing adapters. Features may flow out to this public repo over time, or they may not. No roadmap promises.

macOS-first (built and run on Apple Silicon). Not tested on Windows/Linux yet.

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Quickstart

git clone https://github.com/DiamondAlchemy/vibechemy.git
cd vibechemy
npm install
npm run dev        # launches the app in dev

Full walkthrough: GETTING-STARTED.md.

Then:

1. Register a project (point it at a git repo on your machine, or drag a folder from Finder onto the sidebar).
2. Open the agent roster and make sure at least one CLI agent is installed and signed in.
3. Spawn a worker — it opens in its own terminal, in its own git worktree.
4. Give it a task, watch it work, review its diff, merge it.

Requirements: macOS, Node 20.19+ / 22.12+, tmux, and at least one agent CLI on your PATH. npm install compiles native modules (better-sqlite3, node-pty) from source, so you also need the Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) and python3.

Connecting your agents (it's automatic)

There is no MCP setup step. Vibechemy is the MCP server: on first launch it generates an auth token (stored owner-only in its app data as mcp-token) and starts an authenticated control plane on 127.0.0.1:4880 (4881 in dev). When you summon an orchestrator from the dock, the app writes that CLI's own client config for it — Claude Code gets a generated --mcp-config, Codex gets inline -c mcp_servers.vibechemy.* overrides, and so on — so the pane opens already holding the fleet tools (spawn_worker, send_to_worker, get_diff, merge_worker, …) plus an operating briefing that teaches it the protocol. The Personal Agent slot is wired the same way.

Two deliberate boundaries:

• Workers never inherit the control plane. Only summoned orchestrators get the tools; a plain worker pane is just the CLI, so it can never spawn or merge anything itself.
• Bring your own keys. The app never touches your credentials — install and sign in to each CLI yourself; Vibechemy only detects the result and lights up the roster.

Power-user path: any external MCP client can drive the same control plane directly — point it at http://127.0.0.1:4880/mcp with Authorization: Bearer <contents of mcp-token>.

The terminal gesture cheat sheet

Every pane behaves the same, whichever CLI is inside it:

Gesture	What it does
Click an unfocused pane	Focus it — start typing immediately
Scroll wheel	Scroll that pane's own transcript / scrollback
Option-drag	Select text (auto-copies to clipboard)
Right-click	Copy / Paste menu
⌘C / ⌘V	Standard copy / paste

The whole point: you never have to remember a different command per agent.

The Personal Agent slot

Point the "Personal Agent" setting at your own assistant CLI (command + args + a display name). It becomes a first-class orchestrator you can summon, and it receives an end-of-day handoff — a single prompt telling it to pull the day's activity and tidy the knowledge base. It's the seam where your own agent plugs into the cockpit; the app ships with the slot empty for you to fill.

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Architecture (one paragraph)

src/main/ is the Electron main process (all the real logic — sessions, tmux, git, the MCP server, the stores). src/preload/ is the typed IPC bridge. src/renderer/ is the React UI. src/shared/ is pure, Node-free domain logic that carries the unit tests. Every subsystem has a shared/ half so its logic is testable without touching live services. Start at src/main/index.ts.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Use it, fork it, build your own cockpit.