Shelbi

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An open-source, personal agent orchestrator for the terminal.

GitHub · Docs

What is Shelbi

You talk to one agent, the orchestrator. It writes your work up as tasks, dispatches them to worker agents (Claude Code, Codex, aider, anything with a CLI) running in parallel across your machines, locally or over SSH, and brings finished work back for you to review. Each workspace is a persistent Shelbi session with its own git worktree; Shelbi switches that worktree to each task's branch so tasks can be reviewed and merged independently. Attach to any session from any terminal with shelbi attach <workspace>. A workspace machine needs git and its configured agent CLI, and nothing else: Shelbi runs its own sessions, so there is no dependency beyond the binary.

Install

Shelbi publishes prebuilt releases for macOS (Apple silicon and Intel) and Ubuntu amd64.

macOS: Homebrew

brew tap jlong/shelbi
brew trust jlong/shelbi
brew install shelbi

macOS: the desktop app

Shelbi also has a native macOS app (Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later), a second client over the same daemon and sessions as the TUI. It needs the CLI above; the cask depends on it.

brew install --cask shelbi-desktop

Ubuntu: APT

sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://apt.shelbi.dev/shelbi-archive-keyring.gpg \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/shelbi-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null

echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/shelbi-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.shelbi.dev stable main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/shelbi.list >/dev/null

sudo apt update
sudo apt install shelbi

For build-from-source, manual artifact verification, and the full walkthrough, see the install guide.

First run

Run shelbi in your repo. With no projects configured it drops you into a setup wizard, then launches the TUI. See getting started for the walkthrough.

Requirements

git and an agent CLI such as claude or codex on the hub and every remote workspace machine. Shelbi runs its own sessions, so no terminal multiplexer is required; it also runs fine inside tmux or Screen if you prefer one.

Documentation

The docs at shelbi.dev are the source of truth.

• Getting started: install, first project, first task
• Concepts: orchestrator, workspaces, agents, workflows
• Workflows: feature-branch, trunk-based, forking, git-flow
• Configuration: project and task config reference

Contributing

Shelbi is a Cargo workspace under crates/, a separate Cargo workspace for the macOS desktop app under desktop/, and a Next.js site under site/.

cargo build --workspace
cargo test --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
cd site && npm ci && npm run lint && npm run build

The desktop app builds and tests from its own directory, on its own pinned toolchain (desktop/rust-toolchain.toml); the root --workspace commands don't see it:

cd desktop
cargo build
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo test

See AGENTS.md for the crate layout and contributor conventions, and desktop/README.md for the desktop app. Bugs and feature requests: https://github.com/jlong/shelbi/issues.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.