Welcome to orch

orch is the local runtime that lets several AI coding agents work on your projects without wrecking the repo.

What orch is#

  • A single local binary, orch, that runs underneath the agent CLIs you already use — Claude, OpenCode, Codex, Cursor, Copilot and the rest.
  • It elects one Chair per project (the first interactive seat) and lets that Chair spawn workers for secondary tasks.
  • It puts the workshop's memory on disk — ledger, board, resume, last-session card — instead of in a chat that ends when the window closes.
  • It enforces the shared-code law: locks on shared folders, orch:export as the publish contract, and a symbol index every agent can query before it writes a duplicate.
  • It can proxy model traffic through a local gateway that holds your provider keys, rotates them, and crushes payloads before they leave the machine.

What orch is not#

  • Not a replacement chat or IDE. You still type your prompt inside the agent's own UI. orch claude opens Claude; it does not wrap it in another interface.
  • Not a cloud service you have to join. Linking a workspace to the Orchemax overlook is optional; an unlinked workshop keeps working offline.
  • Not a model provider. orch ships no LLM of its own. You bring the keys, or the agent brings its own plan login.
  • Not a mandate. The seeded doctrine files, the guards and the hooks are opt-in. Your own process wins if you prefer it.

How the pieces fit#

  your terminal
      |
      |  orch claude / orch codex / orch opencode ...
      v
  +--------------------------------------------------+
  |  orch (local runtime)                             |
  |    Chair  --dispatch_worker-->  worker  worker    |
  |    locks | symbols | bus | disk memory | gateway  |
  +--------------------------------------------------+
      |                                    |
      v                                    v
  your workspace on disk            your model providers
  (orch.yaml + .orch/)              (keys stay local)

Where to go next#

  • Install — put the binary on your PATH and find your machine home.
  • Quickstart — bind a workspace, seed it, open the first seat, run the first worker.
  • What to read next — the path that matches what you came here to do.