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Direction

What we are building towards now, so a week of busy work can be checked against it. Alex owns this page. The direction check-in reads it every few days, and every issue names the goal it serves, or says it serves none.

The milestone: an MVP for developers

Developers who build Agents from source can run several coding agents at once, see which one needs them, and answer it from the Mac, the phone or a browser, and it holds up all day. Agents also run on agentsd hosts in the cloud with no Mac awake, and MCP servers and skills come from a marketplace.

Goals

  • It holds up. Nothing crashes, hangs or loses work, and cost stays flat as hosts, clients, projects and sessions grow. Bound what is held or returned before reaching for concurrency.
  • Three clients, one product. The Mac window, the Remote and the web page do the same thing the same way, or the parity table says why not.
  • What merges has been used. A UI change counts as done once someone has run it, on a scratch app or by Alex, not when its pull request lands.
  • A newcomer gets going. A fresh clone builds, pairs a phone and runs a first agent by following the docs, with nothing missing.
  • Agents land work on their own. Issue → lane → pull request → CI → merge runs with nobody watching, and asks Alex only what is Alex's to decide.
  • Hosts in the cloud. A Linux agentsd on a cloud machine is a host, and workspace providers start, stop and create those hosts (#691, specs/691-workspace-providers). The control plane stays on the Mac for now.
  • A marketplace for MCP servers and skills. #687 is walked and shipped on all three clients, private GitHub repositories work (#697), and our MCP servers ship as static Swift binaries, so a cloud host needs no Node (#700).
  • Releases are routine. A release workflow runs the security, runtime and usability reviews when they are stale, fixes the high and medium findings, chooses the next version, and puts the app on TestFlight and on the GitHub release page with nobody watching (#914).

Not now

  • Submitting to App Review.

  • 59 (one-click set-up, a hosted service), #60 (webhooks) and #61 (the control plane in

    the cloud) stay parked.
  • New runtimes. Goose and auto-approve were tried and closed.
  • Unlocking the Mac or keeping it awake to walk a change.
  • Machinery under a layout Alex has not settled. Get the layout in front of Alex first.

Signs we are in the weeds

  • One area is reworked again and again in a few days. finish_turn was made optional, split, then removed between 2026-10-08 and 2026-10-09.
  • More than five merged UI changes nobody has run (the needs-walk label).
  • Issues that serve none of the goals above keep getting started.
  • Most of a week's merges are tooling for agents rather than the product. Static MCP binaries (#700) count as product.

How it is checked

  • The direction check-in (.agents/workflows/direction-check-in.md) runs on Monday and Thursday mornings. It counts the merges since the last check-in against each goal, looks for the signs above, labels unwalked UI changes needs-walk, writes a short report under .agents/reviews/direction/, and asks Alex two or three questions.
  • Fill free slots starts walk lanes instead of new enhancements while more than five issues are labelled needs-walk.
  • When the goals here stop being right, change them here first.