orch

Run AI agents as a team. Show clients a live page — not a Slack thread.

Site: tryorch.us — try a spec in your browser.

orch is a local task orchestrator for freelancers and agencies building with AI. You define the work as a DAG (tasks.json) and dispatch each task to the CLI you route it to — claude, codex, opencode, gemini, agy or muse — in parallel.

• Your client stops asking how it is going. One page — phases, blockers in plain language, hours left — published as a static site or served live behind a token. You write no status update.
• The agents run in parallel without burning your quota. Each task gets its own git worktree, branch and pull request; a rolling token window per provider pauses that provider before it locks you out of your own terminal.
• It runs on your machine, with your CLIs and your keys. One Go binary, no daemon, no hosted service. orch never holds a model key.

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How it works

1. orch atomize --apply   # spec.md → tasks.json → SQLite
2. orch run               # dispatch tasks to AI agents in parallel
3. orch publish           # a page for your client; --tunnel to serve it live

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Quick start

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorcanaimero/orch/main/scripts/install.sh | sh
orch dashboard            # outside a project: the welcome page walks you through it

Run outside a project, orch dashboard opens a welcome page: it checks your AI CLIs, sets up a folder, lets claude plan your idea, shows the tasks and their estimate, and runs the first ones. In a terminal the same path is:

orch dashboard --demo     # a full synthetic project; touches nothing of yours
cd my-project             # a git repository
orch start "what you want to build"

orch start sets the project up with the CLIs it finds, lets claude plan the idea with you (/orch-plan), checks and estimates the plan, and runs the first two tasks with the dashboard open. orch init + orch run is the same path step by step; orch dashboard --tunnel gives your client a tokenized link.

orch is a single Go binary — no Python, no venv, no pip. See Install below for the manual download, and the manual for the full walkthrough.

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Install

Script (Linux/macOS, amd64/arm64):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hectorcanaimero/orch/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Downloads the matching tarball from the latest GitHub Release, verifies its checksum, and installs to ~/.local/bin (INSTALL_DIR=... to override).

A Homebrew tap is not published yet — docs/RELEASING.md has what it needs.

Manual: grab a tarball from the Releases page and put orch on your PATH yourself.

Verify either way with orch --version. See docs/RELEASING.md for the tag scheme and how releases are built, and docs/MANUAL.en.md for the full CLI walkthrough.

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What makes it different

orch isn't competing with LangChain or Devin — it's one of several small, open-source boards for running CLI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode…) in parallel. Here's an honest comparison against the projects builders in that space actually reach for today.

	Multica	Vibe Kanban	Agetor	Claude Squad	orch
GitHub stars	49.6k	28.1k	65	8.5k	2
Stack	Go + Next.js + Postgres	Rust	TypeScript (Electrobun)	Go	Go
License	Apache-2.0 + commercial	Apache-2.0	MIT	AGPL-3.0	MIT
CLIs/agents supported	26	10+	5	~6	6 (claude, codex, opencode, gemini, agy, muse)
Desktop app	✅ Electron	❌	✅ macOS	❌ (TUI)	❌
Mobile app	✅ iOS	❌	❌	❌	❌
Cloud-hosted option	✅ multica.ai	❌ (shut down w/ Bloop)	❌	❌	❌
Single binary	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅
Read-only stakeholder view

Vibe Kanban: Bloop shut down in April 2026 and handed the project to the community as Apache-2.0; cloud features were switched off, local/self-host use continues. Star counts and feature notes are current as of this writing — verify before citing them elsewhere, these projects move fast.

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Configuration

One file. orch init writes it for you:

# .orchestrator/config.yaml
concurrency:
  global_max: 4
  per_provider:
    claude: 2
    gemini: 2

state:
  backend: sqlite         # default; `file` is legacy JSONL

dispatch:
  worktree_mode: true     # default; each task runs in its own git worktree

vcs:
  auto_pr: true           # default; one PR per finished task

dashboard:
  kanban:
    refresh_interval_s: 10

tunnel:
  enabled: false          # flip to share a link with your client (Cloudflare quick tunnel)

github:
  test_command: pytest    # CI workflow orch generates for you
  auto_merge: false       # opt-in; requires branch protection

notifications:
  slack_webhook: ""       # optional: get pinged on task blocks / CI failures

Optional overrides drop in as their own files at the project root: budgets.yaml (spend guardrails), model_router.yaml (routing table — orch router add-missing populates it on demand).

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What your client sees

With tunnel: enabled: true in config.yaml, orch dashboard --tunnel (or the Start button on the dashboard's Tunnel page) opens a Cloudflare quick tunnel — no Cloudflare account needed, just cloudflared, whose install steps the page shows — and gives you a client-portal link with a token in it. Send it; the numbers update themselves, and stopping the tunnel revokes the link. The client gets:

• Executive summary in plain business language, recomputed on every page load — no LLM call, so it is free and always says the same thing twice.
• Phase timeline — progress per phase, bar width proportional to estimated effort, with the blocked phase called out.
• Blockers with the reason attached, quoted straight into the summary: "Stripe sandbox key still pending from the client."
• ETA — hours remaining at the current measured pace, with how fresh the numbers are.

Spend is off by default: flip dashboard.show_spend_to_stakeholder if you want your client to see what the run has cost. Either way they never see a log line, a prompt, a diff, or a per-model cost breakdown.

GIF: not recorded yet. The shot list is written and reproducible — see docs/media/GIF-SCRIPT.md. Walk-through in docs/DELIVERING-TO-STAKEHOLDERS.md.

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Roadmap

Shipped — worktrees, a pull request and CI watch per task, the budget window per provider, the client page and its PDF, the guided orch init wizard with five templates, the operator dashboard (Now, ⌘K, run receipts) in English, Spanish and Portuguese, orch dashboard --demo, and a Cloudflare quick tunnel that requires a token. The releases are the living list.

Next — a DAG visual editor, a VS Code extension, and orch dashboard --portfolio for agencies running several clients at once.

Every pull request here is reviewed in CI by an AI against a written checklist before a human merges it — see docs/CI-REVIEW.md.

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Follow the build

A release a week, in the open: every change, what broke and the numbers behind it. Releases · Atom feed · LinkedIn, in Portuguese · X, in Spanish · tryorch.us

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Documentation

• English manual
• Manual en español
• Manual em português
• CLI reference (flags, parity with Python)
• Dashboard / stakeholder guide
• Release process / tag scheme
• Developer notes
• Roadmap (living doc)

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Python legacy

orch was originally a Python CLI + FastAPI dashboard; it's being rewritten as a single Go binary (this README, and everything above, describes the Go version). The last Python release is frozen on the python-legacy branch, tagged v0.11.0-py — no new features land on that line, only the Go binary moves forward.

pipx install git+https://github.com/hectorcanaimero/[email protected]

Its own manual is preserved at that tag. See docs/RELEASING.md for why the two lines share one tag namespace, split by a -py suffix.