Palisade

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Palisade is in public beta. It is the tool we build Palisade with, every day, and it will have rough edges. Issues are read daily.

What it does

• Verification is the only evidence. A change is green because a named verify command exited 0 at a named commit. Never because a model said so. Merge stays disabled until that happens, or you override it on purpose and it says so.

• Playbooks. Draw a graph of agent nodes with gates between them (a verify command, or your approval), save it, run it as one unit from any thread with |=.

• Any ACP agent, none compiled in. Claude Code, Codex, and whatever else the ACP registry lists and you have on PATH. Palisade discovers agents at runtime and speaks ACP to all of them. Pick a different agent per thread.

• Fleet board is home. Every thread across your open projects is a row: needs attention, running, unreviewed, or idle. Agent, diff stat, verify evidence, merge readiness, and overlap with other running threads, all on one screen. A finished turn you have not opened yet badges the dock, and ⌘⇧U takes you to the next one.

• One worktree per thread. Agents never share a working tree, so two threads can run at once on the same project without stepping on each other.

• Spec, then build. Two modes only: spec writes an OpenSpec change with the agent's permissions locked down; go builds it. OpenSpec stays the source of truth; Palisade never writes a spec file.

• Review lane. Read a thread's diff file by file, with per-file viewed state and the verify evidence beside it, before you merge.

• The rest of an IDE. Editor with local fill-in-the-middle completion (a bundled model, no upload), terminals, a native Preview browser per project, git, MCP server management, and a command palette.

• Local first. Session logs, completion telemetry and settings live under ~/.palisade-code. Network traffic is what you would expect: your agents, your git remotes, the ACP and MCP registries, and update checks.

Install

Platform	Download
macOS 11+, Apple Silicon and Intel (one universal build)	Latest .dmg
Windows, Linux	Not yet. Follow the issue tracker for progress.

The app is signed and notarized. It updates itself; each update is checked against the project's signing key before it is installed.

You also need a coding agent. Palisade reads the ACP registry and lists every agent that is ready on your Mac. Agents that ship through npx or uvx, including Claude Code and Codex, appear under Add an agent in the agent picker: one click adds one, and its adapter downloads the first time you use it. Sign in with that agent's own CLI if it asks; Palisade shows you how.

Spec mode needs Node.js (for npx). You don't have to install OpenSpec yourself: if openspec isn't on your PATH, Palisade runs a pinned version (npx -y @fission-ai/[email protected]), and the first Spec turn in a project without an openspec/ folder creates one with openspec init --tools none. If openspec is on your PATH, Palisade uses that copy instead.

Build from source

pnpm install
pnpm start        # tauri dev: compiles the Rust backend and opens the window

On macOS, dev rebuilds and local packaging prefer an available valid Apple-issued Developer ID or Apple Development signing identity and a fixed identifier. After a one-time Keychain grant, its team identity stays stable across rebuilds. CODESIGN_ID overrides the certificate. Without an Apple-issued identity, the runner falls back to Palisade Code Dev (see package.sh for setup), or ad-hoc signing with a warning: these fallbacks can still prompt for Keychain access after each rebuild because macOS partitions other signing identities by binary hash. CODESIGN_ID=- explicitly selects ad-hoc signing. This does not change release signing or require notarization for dev builds.

Command	Purpose
pnpm test	All frontend tests (vitest)
npx tsc --noEmit	Typecheck
cd src-tauri && cargo test	All Rust tests
pnpm build	tsc && vite build

Rust + Tauri 2 backend, React 19 + TypeScript frontend, Mantine UI. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the layout, the rules the codebase runs on, and a glossary of the words the UI uses.

Project layout

• src/App.tsx — the IDE shell: panes, threads, chat, routing
• src/api.ts — typed wrapper over every Tauri IPC command
• src-tauri/src/lib.rs — IPC command layer (generate_handler! registry at the bottom)
• src-tauri/src/acp_*.rs — ACP registry, client, and event mapping
• src-tauri/src/fleet.rs — the Fleet board's status derivation
• src-tauri/src/chain*.rs — playbook definitions, runner, history
• src-tauri/src/store.rs — append-only session store
• src/__tests__/* — frontend tests, one per source file; Rust tests are inline mod tests

Documentation

• CHANGELOG.md — what shipped in each release
• PRODUCT.md — what Palisade is for, and what it deliberately is not
• DESIGN.md — the design system every screen is built from
• docs/adr — architecture decisions
• docs/tester-releases.md — how a release is built, signed and published
• AGENTS.md — packaging and per-machine codesigning for local builds

Contributing

Read CONTRIBUTING.md, then open an issue or a PR. Security problems go through SECURITY.md, never a public issue. This project follows the Contributor Covenant.

License

Apache License 2.0. Palisade bundles llama.cpp (MIT) as its local completion sidecar; see NOTICE.