Codenest

A cross-platform desktop command center for running and supervising AI agent teams — built and tested on macOS first.

What is Codenest

Codenest is a local-first desktop app for running and supervising teams of AI coding agents. It hosts embedded terminals that run real Claude Code CLI sessions, tracks their work on a kanban Work Board, and runs agents on cron Schedules — all from a single window, with every bit of state kept in a local SQLite database on your machine.

It is built on a cross-platform stack (Tauri 2, a Python sidecar, and a React frontend) intended for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Today it is built and tested on macOS (Apple Silicon) — the only supported platform for now; other platforms are on the roadmap.

Download

Grab the latest macOS (Apple Silicon) .dmg from the Releases page. Builds for other platforms will be added there as they are tested.

1. Open the .dmg and drag Codenest.app into /Applications.

2. Releases are unsigned, so clear the quarantine attribute:

   xattr -cr /Applications/Codenest.app

3. On first launch, if macOS blocks the app: macOS 15+ open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway; on older macOS, right-click the app and choose Open.

See docs/install.md for the full walkthrough, where data lives, and how to reset the app.

Features

Codenest's sidebar is organized into groups. The features below ship today and are visible by default; individual features can be toggled under Settings → Features.

Workspace

• Command — the Command Center: launch and supervise agent runs.
• Overview — a dashboard of current activity and status.
• Projects — the repositories and workspaces your agents work in.
• Work Board — a kanban board of tasks and workflow items.
• Notifications — in-app alerts.

Agents

• Agents — your team of agent definitions.
• Schedules — cron-scheduled agent runs.
• Terminal — embedded xterm.js terminals backed by real PTYs.

Knowledge

• Knowledge — a document library.

Tools

• Preview — an embedded webview preview pane.

System

• Budgets — usage and cost budgets.
• Settings — app and feature configuration.

Planned (not yet available)

These are placeholders for features we intend to build. They are disabled by default and hidden from the sidebar until they are ready — the details below are provisional and may change:

• Snippets — a snippet library.
• Gallery — a gallery of reusable items.
• Feed — an activity feed.
• MCP — manage MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers.
• Integrations — external integrations.
• Plugins — plugin management.
• Sync — synchronization settings.

Screenshots

Command — the Command Center: a live constellation of your projects and the agents attached to them, session counters, and a running activity feed.

Expand the constellation to full screen to pull agents and projects apart, pin nodes where you want them, and scrub across the last hour, day, or week.

Overview — a 24-hour pulse of cost, sessions, and completed tasks, plus an attention queue, budget burn, and a momentum timeline of commits and sessions.

Agents — your team of agent definitions, grouped by scope. Codenest ships with three org agents (Atlas, Orion, Vega) shared across the workspace.

More screenshots — Launch, Projects, Budgets, first-run setup

Launch Agent — pick a project, provider, and profile, lay out a grid of panes, and launch embedded or as a popout window. Save any setup as a preset.

Projects — the repositories your agents work in. Imported projects stay read-only sources; nothing is ever written into their folders.

Budgets — per-workspace or per-project spend caps by period, with an optional hard stop that blocks new sessions at 100%.

First-run setup — a seven-step wizard that creates the app-managed workspace, imports your projects, and connects your AI provider.

How it works

A Tauri 2 (Rust) shell is the process supervisor. On launch it spawns a FastAPI (Python) sidecar that owns all application state in SQLite and serves it on 127.0.0.1:8002, then waits for the sidecar's health check before showing the UI. The React/TypeScript frontend talks to the sidecar over HTTP/SSE and uses Tauri invoke for shell-level work — PTY-backed xterm.js terminals, windows, the preview webview, and screenshots. Agent process spawning lives in the Rust shell; the sidecar queues due scheduled runs and the shell dispatches them. Everything runs on your machine: the sidecar is loopback-only and the app sends no telemetry.

Build from source

Prerequisites:

• macOS (Apple Silicon) — the only platform tested so far
• Xcode Command Line Tools
• Rust (stable, 1.88+)
• Node 20+ with pnpm
• Python 3.12

python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
pnpm install
pnpm tauri:dev     # sidecar archive auto-builds via the Tauri beforeDevCommand hook
pnpm tauri:build   # production .app + DMG

The Python sidecar is packaged into an archive by scripts/build-sidecar.sh. You do not need to run it by hand: pnpm tauri:dev builds it on first run if missing, and pnpm tauri:build always rebuilds it. To prebuild it manually, run bash scripts/build-sidecar.sh.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, the make check-all gate, and project conventions.

License

Codenest is licensed under the Functional Source License, Version 1.1, ALv2 Future License (FSL-1.1-ALv2) — a source-available license. You may use, copy, modify, and redistribute the source for any purpose except a competing commercial use. Two years after each version is released, that version automatically converts to the Apache License 2.0.

See NOTICE for attribution and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md for bundled third-party dependencies.