Agent Desk

A local GUI for reading and driving the agent sessions that agent-manager runs.

Website: agent-desk.app

agent-manager stays the session engine: every agent runs in its tmux server, and closing Agent Desk leaves them all running. Agent Desk is the viewing and talking surface: transcripts rendered as documents, a proper composer, and notifications when a session needs you.

Agent Desk is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the agent-manager authors or Anthropic.

The screenshot shows anonymized fixture data (make screenshot).

Status: early. Built and used on macOS (Apple Silicon); CI also builds and tests on Linux. The design and milestones are in docs/plan.md.

Prerequisites

• agent-manager 0.48 or later, with tmux
• Claude Code
• Go 1.27 and Node 24 or later, to build

Install

With Homebrew, on macOS or Linux:

brew install gsperry/tap/agent-desk

It installs agent-manager and tmux with it; brew upgrade updates it. The releases also have the command for each platform as a tarball, with checksums.

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/gsperry/agent-desk
cd agent-desk
make build
install -m 0755 bin/agent-desk ~/.local/bin/agent-desk   # or any directory on your PATH

To update a source build, pull and repeat the last two commands.

Desktop app (macOS)

make desktop builds desktop/target/release/bundle/macos/Agent Desk.app: Agent Desk in its own window, with native notifications, a count of sessions that need you on the dock icon and in the menu bar, and Control-Option-A to bring it forward. Closing the window hides it; quit from the menu bar or with ⌘Q. It needs Rust and the Tauri CLI (cargo install tauri-cli --version "^2"). Copy the app to /Applications. Releases also carry the app (Agent-Desk_<version>_macos.zip); until a release is signed, right-click it and choose Open the first time. Quitting the app leaves every agent running. Its server logs to ~/Library/Logs/Agent Desk/server.log. Settings → Desktop app → "Start at login, in the background" keeps remote access and notifications running after a restart. Run either the app or agent-desk from a terminal; if both run, remote access moves to whichever is left when the other stops.

Run

agent-desk

It opens Agent Desk in your browser. The link carries a token that changes on every start; the terminal prints it too, in case the browser does not open. Closing the terminal stops Agent Desk and leaves every agent running.

Flag	Default	Meaning
--port	7317	Port on 127.0.0.1. A busy port falls back to a free one.
--no-open	off	Print the URL without opening a browser.

Oversight

• Overview: the home screen (click "Agent Desk" in the sidebar) shows a card per session: what it is doing now, its last reply and your last prompt, context use, and when it last changed. Sessions that need you come first.
• Subagents: the Agents button in a session's header lists the subagents its conversation spawned, running first, with type, description and duration. Click one to read its transcript, live while it runs. Agent tool calls link to their subagent.
• Since you last looked: sidebar rows with new activity get a dot, and opening the session shows a divider before what arrived since your last visit.
• Context meter: the session header shows how much context the latest turn used and, once that model has auto-compacted in a transcript Agent Desk has read, how close it is to compacting again.

Review and steer

• Changes: the Changes button shows the session's git changes, uncommitted or since its branch left the default branch. Click a diff line to comment; Send review sends all comments as one numbered prompt. Git runs read-only with external diff tools, text converters, the repository's filter drivers, hooks and fsmonitor disabled, so a repository's config cannot make it run commands.
• Shared files: ⚠ on a sidebar row and in the session header means another live session wrote the same file in the last six hours.
• Activity filter: above the transcript, show all activity, only shell commands, only file changes, or only errors. Risky shell commands (recursive deletes, force pushes, hard resets, sudo and others) carry a warning badge.
• Snippets: the composer's ⋯ menu inserts a saved reply, or type /name and press Tab. Edit them in Settings; {session}, {branch}, {project} and {directory} are filled in.
• Images: paste an image into the composer. It is saved owner-only under your user cache directory, its path is inserted for the agent to read, and it is removed after seven days.

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗