Deskmates
Deskmates
Deskmates runs the CLI coding agents you already pay for as a coordinated team — each in a real terminal, with shared memory and a supervisor.
Local-first and open source. Your agents use your logins and your filesystem. Nothing is proxied through anyone's server.
Windows 10/11 · 125 MB · portable, no installer · free.
Or open the demo — the real interface in your browser, nothing installed.
It is a harness, not a model. It drives the agent CLIs on your machine and gives them the things a single terminal cannot: memory, coordination, and a way to watch them.
A local, git-backed memory layer with a mailbox per agent. Agents leave each other durable messages instead of fighting over one context window — so work survives a restart.
One agent routes work to the others and only escalates to you when a decision genuinely needs a human. You are the exception handler, not the message bus.
Every agent is an avatar on a pixel office floor. Click one to open its live terminal, read what it is doing, and take over mid-task.
Per-agent token budgets, a cost and runaway circuit breaker, and a human-in-the-loop gate to steer, constrain, or stop any agent.
Deskmates wraps CLIs you install yourself and runs each as a real process in a pseudo-terminal. It ships no model and resells no tokens.
Deskmates drives a CLI — it does not include one. Any of the engines above works.
Give each one a name, a sprite, an engine, a project folder, and a standing goal.
They work, message each other through the hive, and surface to you only when it matters.
Three steps. The whole runtime is bundled — no Python, no compiler, no Node install needed.
Deskmates 0.1.0 for Windows — portable, so unzip it anywhere and run Deskmates.exe. There is no installer step.
macOS and Linux builds are coming.
The build is not code signed, so Windows will caution you on first launch. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
Deskmates drives the CLI you already use — install Claude Code, Codex, Gemini or another engine and make sure it is on your PATH. Deskmates ships no model and resells no tokens.
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, Linux. Development is macOS-first; Windows and Linux get less testing. |
|---|---|
| Requires | Node.js 20 or newer, plus at least one agent CLI on your PATH. |
| Built with | Electron, React, TypeScript, Pixi.js, node-pty, SQLite, Monaco. |
| Data | Everything stays on your machine. Product analytics are opt-out and ship no prompts, code, paths, or agent output. |
| Updates | Disabled in this build. It will never replace itself behind your back. |
| Licence | MIT for the code. The bundled pixel art is non-commercial only. |