stablyai/orca

Orca is the ADE for working with a fleet of parallel agents. Run any coding agent with your own subscription. Available on desktop, mobile and remote runtime

Summary

Orca is an open-source TypeScript "Agent Development Environment" (ADE) that runs multiple coding CLI agents side-by-side, each in its own isolated git worktree, and tracks them in one place. Available on macOS, Windows, and Linux with a mobile companion app, it supports any terminal-based coding agent — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, and many others — using your own subscriptions.

What it is useful for

Orca is built around the workflow of running several AI coding sessions at once. Its Parallel Worktrees feature lets you "fan one prompt across five agents, each in its own isolated git worktree" so you can compare outputs and merge the best one, instead of serializing work behind a single agent.

Other documented capabilities include Terminal Splits ("Ghostty-class terminals with WebGL rendering, infinite splits, and scrollback that survives restarts"), Design Mode (clicking a UI element in an embedded Chromium window sends its HTML, CSS, and a cropped screenshot into an agent's prompt), Annotate AI Diffs (drop comments on diff lines and ship them back to the agent), and SSH Worktrees for spinning up sessions on a remote box with auto-reconnect and port forwarding. GitHub and Linear are integrated in-app for browsing PRs, issues, and project boards without leaving the workspace. An account switcher surfaces Claude and Codex usage with rate-limit resets so you can hot-swap accounts without re-logging in.

How engineers can use it

The README points to a desktop download page or direct builds from GitHub Releases as the primary path, and documents two package manager commands:

# macOS via Homebrew
brew install --cask stablyai/orca/orca

# Arch Linux (AUR)
yay -S stably-orca-bin

Windows and Linux builds are also linked (.exe installer and AppImage respectively). A mobile companion pairs with the desktop host — iOS via the App Store, Android via APK — and the pairing relay lives in the cloud/ subdirectory of this repository.

Day-to-day, you log into each agent with your own subscription, then either run a single agent or fan a task out across parallel worktrees. Quick-open searches across worktrees, files, agents, and commands. The Orca CLI (orca worktree create, snapshot, click, fill) lets scripts and other agents drive Orca — described in the README as the scriptable surface. A Computer Use mode lets agents operate visible desktop UI when a workflow requires real interaction.

For local development, the README defers to .github/CONTRIBUTING.md; it does not inline build steps, so check that file first. Because Orca ships as a desktop application rather than an npm package, there is no documented embeddable API — the CLI is the documented integration point.