Orchicon GitHub

Agents chat. Workers ship.

Orchicon is a self-hosted control plane for autonomous AI work. It keeps the backlog, assigns each task to a team of AI Workers, runs them through review loops and human approvals, holds them to a budget, and picks up where they left off when something breaks.

Prefer a classic harness? Orchicon works like any other one too. Open Ask Orchicon in Iteration mode and pair with it directly in your repo, from the browser or the terminal. Add workflows, budgets and schedules only when you need them.

One command installs the whole stack: control plane, web app, terminal client, Postgres, NATS and a Grafana telemetry plane.

$ curl -fsSL https://orchicon.dev/install | bash
Install Orchicon Read the docs

macOS, Linux and Windows (WSL2). Or one docker run.

Two full clients, one product: work in the web app or run orch in your terminal.

The whole product, in your browser

The web app ships inside the control plane binary, so there is nothing extra to host. Plan with Ask Orchicon, shape the backlog, draw workflows, and watch every run land, with the same data and the same permissions as the terminal client.

localhost:8080 · Ask Orchicon
Ask Orchicon in the web app: a Brainstorm conversation showing tables of modes and platform pillars, with conversation folders on the right. Work items tree: epics, features and tasks with sequential order, branch names, merged pull requests and status. Visual workflow editor for the SDLC Non-human workflow, with versions and runs listed below. Schedules history: 367 past runs with durations, workflow and run identifiers. Idea Cloud: feature ideas from a research run, each with cited sources and Approve and Dismiss buttons.

    Seven menus, same seven workspaces

    The top bar mirrors the terminal's function keys, so moving between the two costs nothing.

    Ask OrchiconConversations in folders, with attachments, voice input and one-click compaction.
    WorkTree, board and archive views, drag-to-reorder, filters and bulk start.
    ExecutionWorkflow editor, runs, executions and schedules with live step transitions.
    AutomationRecurring items and the Idea Cloud triage board.
    Overview, Enforcement, ControlStatus at a glance, policies and approvals, settings and secrets.

    What the browser is best at

    • Drawing workflows. Drag steps from a palette, connect them edge to edge, undo, and publish a locked version.
    • Seeing the whole backlog. Hundreds of items with branches, merged PRs and sequence order in one scroll.
    • Reading long answers. Rendered tables and code, collapsible replies, raw-text copy and jump to latest.
    • Staying live. Live clocks, notifications and status that update as Workers move.

    The whole product, in your terminal

    orch is not a companion viewer. It is a full client with read and write parity: create, edit, publish, approve, cancel, retry and watch Workers stream live without reaching for the mouse. Run it on your laptop, over SSH, or in a tmux pane beside your editor.

    orch F1 Ask Orchicon: a Brainstorm conversation with visible reasoning and a conversation list. orch F3 Work: the work item tree with a detail pane and acceptance review. orch F4 Execution: workflows list and the SDLC Human workflow as a step list. orch F5 Automation: editing a recurring item with a calendar date picker.

      Seven workspaces, one key each

      F1 Ask OrchiconConversations in all three modes, with reasoning, diffs and live cost.
      F2 OverviewProjects, runs and Workers at a glance.
      F3 WorkThe work item tree: create, sequence, set status, bulk-bind workflows.
      F4 ExecutionWorkflows, runs and executions, with a flow view of every step.
      F5 AutomationRecurring items, schedules and the Idea Cloud.
      F6 EnforcementPolicies, approvals and budgets.
      F7 ControlSettings, secrets and platform administration.

      Keys you will use all day

      /
      Slash commands and the command palette
      ctrld
      Slide out the file diff sidebar
      ctrlg
      Jump between the composer and the content
      space
      Mark items for a bulk action
      W
      Set workflow and runtime image on every marked item
      enter
      Open details, or the flow view of a workflow
      ctrly
      Stop a reply mid-stream
      altenter
      New line in the multi-line composer
      • 43 themes, including true transparency where your terminal shows through and text adapts to stay readable.
      • Mouse when you want it. Click to select, scroll, and click your own message to copy it.
      • Always honest about cost. Context, tokens, cache hit rate and dollars sit under the composer as you type.

      An agent waits for a prompt. A Worker shows up with a job.

      Agents are good at a single task in a single session, as long as someone is there to steer. A Worker has a role, a scope, tools it is allowed to use, a budget, and a process it answers to. The hard part is everything around the task: deciding what to build, checking the result, keeping costs sane, and not losing a day of work when a run falls over. That is the part Orchicon does.

      An agent on its ownWorkers under Orchicon
      Where work comes fromWhatever you type into the prompt today.A backlog of epics, features, tasks and subtasks with dependencies, run order and recurring schedules.
      How it gets doneOne model, one pass, one opinion.A workflow of specialised Workers (architect, engineer, reviewer, QA, DevOps) with review loops and human approval gates.
      Quality controlYou read the diff and hope.Reviewers can send work back, capped at a set number of loops. Every item gets an acceptance review recorded against the run.
      When it failsYou notice, then start over.Recovery captures, summarises, preserves, reviews, plans and resumes, escalating from L1 to L3 if it has to.
      CostYou find out on the invoice.Hard ceilings on tokens, dollars, wall-clock time and tool calls, rolled up by tenant, project, task and execution.
      SafetyThe prompt asks it nicely not to.Disallowed tools are withheld and refused at execution. Every dispatch passes a Rego policy with a full decision trace.
      IsolationRuns in your working copy.Each run gets its own container and git worktree, reset to pristine afterwards. Nothing leaks between runs.
      VisibilityTerminal scrollback.Traces, logs and metrics in Grafana, an audit trail of every action, and a searchable history of every run.

      From an idea to a merged pull request

      This is the loop Orchicon was built around, and the one it uses to build itself. It is also the logo: six steps, and the last one lands. The work items and schedules in these screenshots are Orchicon's own backlog.

      1. 1

        Talk it through

        Brainstorm with Ask Orchicon. It reads your actual repository, so the plan is grounded in real files and line numbers.

      2. 2

        Turn it into work

        When a decision lands, it becomes a work item with scope and acceptance criteria detailed enough for a Worker to finish without coming back with questions.

      3. 3

        Bind a workflow

        Choose how it gets built: a full SDLC team with or without human gates, a local-models-only team, or a single quick job. Bind a whole selection in one gesture.

      4. 4

        Dispatch safely

        Reconcilers check policy and budgets, pull a warm container, check out a worktree and start the first Worker. No cold starts.

      5. 5

        Review, loop, approve

        Reviewers and QA send work back until it passes. You approve at the gates you chose. Every step transition streams live.

      6. 6

        Land it

        The branch is pushed, the PR is merged, and the acceptance review is saved on the work item. The next item in sequence starts on its own.

      Workflows: design the team that builds each task

      A workflow is a graph of Workers, approval gates and loop decisions. Reviewers can send work back a set number of times, humans step in only where you ask them to, and every published version is locked so a run always knows exactly which process it followed.

      Visual workflow editor with the SDLC Non-human workflow, a palette of steps and a properties panel.
      Drag it together in the browser, with undo, versions and a list of runs.
      The SDLC Human workflow as an eleven-step list in the orch terminal client.
      Read, edit and publish the same graph as a step list in orch.

      Ask Orchicon: three modes, enforced by the platform

      Ask Orchicon is the colleague who holds the whole system in their head. Its modes are not prompt suggestions. A mode's disallowed tools are withheld from the model and refused at execution, so Brainstorm cannot be talked into editing your files. The rule is adapter-agnostic, so every new runtime inherits it.

      Iteration is also how you use Orchicon like a regular harness: one Worker, your repo, you in the loop, with nothing else to set up.

      ModeWhat it doesWhat you get back
      BrainstormArchitecture, trade-offs, research and planning, grounded in your codebase. Read-only.Scoped work items with acceptance criteria
      IterationBranches, edits, runs tests and commits with you in the loop.Working commits and a pull request
      Quick WorkSpins up a temporary Worker and workflow, fires one run, cleans up after itself.The finished job, with nothing left behind

      Autonomous market research from a scheduled Worker

      A recurring Worker scans the market on a schedule, checks what it finds against real sources, and files evidence-backed feature ideas into the Idea Cloud. You spend five minutes triaging instead of an afternoon researching.

      1. 1Schedule itA recurring item with Outputs: ideas fires on your interval, inside your work window.
      2. 2Research itA research Worker surveys competitors, articles and releases, then verifies each claim.
      3. 3File itEach idea lands with its sources, its reasoning and the run that produced it.
      4. 4Triage itApprove turns it into a real work item. Dismiss sends it to Rejected, kept as history so it never resurfaces.
      The Idea Cloud: three feature ideas from one research run, including tenant-level spend governance, external secrets-manager integration and sub-agent delegation, each with cited sources and Approve and Dismiss buttons.

      Ideas you can check, not vibes

      • Cited. Every idea quotes its outside evidence with dates and links, so you can verify it in a click.
      • Traceable. Each one names the recurring item and run that spawned it.
      • Kept apart. Ideas live on their own board until you approve them, so your backlog stays yours.
      • Remembered. Rejected ideas stay readable and are never proposed again.

      The three ideas in the screenshot came from a single run of Orchicon researching its own market.

      Budgets: cost is a constraint, not a report

      Every execution runs under ceilings with defaults calibrated from real usage. When a session gets expensive, Orchicon trims its own context and keeps working instead of re-sending an ever-growing history. Cache re-reads do not count as work, so a long task cannot trip its budget by re-reading what it already knows.

      TokensPer execution, per task, per project
      DollarsRolled up to the tenant, streamed live
      Wall-clockRunaway Workers stop outright
      Tool callsHang and loop guards on top

      Everything a crew of Workers needs

      Orchicon owns the parts that make autonomous work dependable and leaves the actual execution to a runtime you choose.

      AreaWhat you get
      Work itemsEpic, Feature, Task and Subtask form a dependency graph with cycle detection. Sequences, reordering, bulk actions, board and tree views, archive, and recurring fires.
      WorkersVersioned definitions with system prompt, permissions, gated tools and budgets. Lifecycle runs draft, published, deprecated, retired. The model is pinned by a human, with no silent failover.
      WorkflowsStep graphs with task, approval, decision, parallel, loop and recover steps. Visual editor, edit locks, immutable versions, retry-in-place and force-progress.
      Projects & contextproject_dir scopes every Worker to a repo. context_files injects files or whole directories into the prompt. Git strategy per project, worktrees always isolated.
      ExecutionReconcilers create executions and dispatch them to runtime adapters, in-process or in a per-run container from a warm pool.
      RuntimesA built-in engine that needs nothing installed, plus pluggable adapters over gRPC such as OpenCode. Buildable images from apt packages and toolchains, chosen per work item.
      RecoveryFailures are recoverable by default: capture, summarise, preserve, review, plan, resume. Checkpoint replay, bounded auto-relax and L1 to L3 escalation.
      GovernanceOPA/Rego policy at the dispatch decision, approvals, budgets, a full audit trail, AES-256-GCM secrets and Postgres row-level security per tenant.
      ReliabilityStall detection, liveness probes and nudges, repetition and text-loop guards, tool-hang redirects and an execution reaper.
      ObservabilityOpenTelemetry into Tempo traces, Loki logs and VictoriaMetrics metrics. Cost rolls up from execution to tenant, streamed live.
      IntegrationsA curated MCP catalog (filesystem, GitHub, Postgres, Playwright, Sentry, Slack and more) with one-click install and ${SECRET} references.
      AutomationRecurring items on interval schedules with day toggles and work windows. A research Worker proposes evidence-backed features into the Idea Cloud for you to approve or dismiss.
      DeploymentThe whole stack in one container, or dev and prod as two containers with your data preserved. orchicon install brings it up.

      Orchicon orchestrates. Runtimes execute.

      The control plane is a single Go binary. Reconcilers keep the world converged on what you declared, the way Kubernetes does for containers. Runtimes never touch Postgres or NATS directly; everything streams over gRPC.

      To run work somewhere new, implement orchicon.adapter.v1. The built-in engine is one implementation of it, not a special case. External adapters are mounted from your host and never bundled, which keeps Orchicon redistributable whatever an adapter's licence says.

      YouWeb app, orch terminal client, CLI and API (Protobuf + Connect: gRPC, REST, streaming)
      Control planeOne Go binary with the embedded web app
      ReconcilersSchedulerRego policyBudgetsRecoveryAudit
      State and signalsPostgres with row-level security, NATS, and an OpenTelemetry collector feeding Tempo, Loki and VictoriaMetrics
      RuntimesBuilt-in engine or adapters over orchicon.adapter.v1, each run in its own warm-pool container, run as your user, torn down at completion
      Built-in engineOpenCodeYour adapter

      Install in one command

      The installer downloads the orchicon binary, pulls the images, starts the runtime daemon and launches a single-container instance. Re-run it to update.

      $ curl -fsSL https://orchicon.dev/install | bash

      Requires curl, tar and Docker.

      1. 1
        InstallRun the command for your platform. Flags like --version, --no-setup and --uninstall are in the README.
      2. 2
        Open the appThe control plane and web app come up on localhost:8080. Sign in with the built-in dev identity provider.
      3. 3
        Create a projectPoint it at a repository. Every Worker is scoped to that directory.
      4. 4
        Ask, then dispatchBrainstorm in Ask Orchicon, turn the result into a work item, bind a workflow and start it. Watch it in the browser or in orch.

      Building Orchicon itself? git clone, then make build and make dev-start. Needs Go 1.26+, Node 22+ and Docker.

      Leave the agents at the prompt. Put Workers on the payroll.

      Give them a backlog, a process and a budget, and let them ship.

      Install Orchicon Star on GitHub Read the docs