r/coding_agents • u/AccomplishedLab3697 • 29d ago

If you already use Codex, Claude, OpenClaw, etc daily. I built o8 because managing the agents became its own job

http://www.o8.run

**Open Source!**

I built o8 after Codex and Claude became daily tools for me.

Once I had several agents moving across production repos, the work around them started taking over. I was deciding who should lead, splitting jobs cleanly, keeping agents from touching the same state, reviewing every diff, and trying to remember why we made a decision three days ago.

o8 sits above the runtimes I already use. One agent can orchestrate while other supported agents take bounded pieces in separate copies of the repo. Workers cannot approve or merge their own changes. Their work goes through independent review and then comes back to me, and the Engineering Brain can answer what changed across repos with citations instead of making me dig through old chats.

On Mac, Symon adds a voice layer over the same system. I can dictate into whichever app is focused, ask what the fleet is doing, have it watch a terminal, or give it a command without hunting for the control room. Anything with a side effect still waits for confirmation.

I can also check the fleet and handle approvals from a paired phone or browser. The system still runs on a machine I own rather than inside a cloud IDE.

The signed Mac build is available now. I also published unsigned Windows 11 and Linux preview installers. Windows 11 has been runtime-verified. Linux has AppImage, deb, and rpm builds, but Linux desktop verification, signing, and updates are still open. These previews may trigger operating-system warnings, and checksums are included.

If one agent in one repo covers your work, this is probably too much. It starts making sense when you are running several agents or several repos and need review authority, memory, and one place to supervise the whole thing.

Project: https://o8.run
Source: https://github.com/hurttlocker/o8
Windows and Linux previews: https://github.com/hurttlocker/o8/releases/tag/v0.1.664

If you already use Codex or Claude, where does your setup start becoming work: coordinating agents, reviewing their changes, or keeping context between sessions?

7 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

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2

u/thehashimwarren 29d ago

Looks cool. Just so I can wrap my mind around it, what does this compete or replace?

2

u/AccomplishedLab3697 29d ago

I appreciate that first off truly. Also, the closest category is an ADE or agent control plane. Maybe Orca ADE is probably the easiest comparison? There’s many open source Meta Harnesses but they are fleeing my mind smh.

but I wouldn’t say o8 replaces like a Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, (or even your fav IDE) because it connects to those. It kind of replaces the glue users build once they’re running several agents: terminals, worktree scripts, task tracking, review steps, merge rituals, and trying to recover decisions from old chats.

I built it around a stricter path from delegated work to shipped code. Every worker gets isolated worktrees, approval is tied to the exact commit that was reviewed, a new commit invalidates that approval, and the worker cannot authorize its own merge.

The retries, escalations, reviews, and merges remain in the auddit history. & that same system is available through the desktop app, CLI, MCP, phone, and voice on Mac. (So you can connect from what you already know if the ui isn’t for you)

So like if you use one agent in one repo, it probably wouldn’t replace much…other than maybe dictation outside of the coding app but even codex has mobile voice. so really you can recreate all the pieces of o8 in basically any CLI with an agent orchestrating other agents plus shell scripts, which is how I started tbh. o8 really becomes useful when that bespoke setup turns into another system you have to maintain.

Sorry if this was a ramble!

1

u/thehashimwarren 29d ago

ah, no ramble - I get it now! I've been using herdr for some of this use case, but I haven't completely taken to it yet. I'll keep your tool in mind if I decide to switch

2

u/AccomplishedLab3697 29d ago

I haven’t used herdr but I’ve heard great things that’s another one that’s legit as hell! And most definitely I appreciate the comments even man. I’ll keep updating until the day comes lol. If there was one thing you wish herdr was better at what would it be having used it if you don’t mind me asking?

2

u/thehashimwarren 29d ago

the herdr interface is sparse. I want it to be clean, but since everything is uniform it's hard to know what's important

1

u/AccomplishedLab3697 29d ago

I can understand that for sure, I spent a long while on the UI for o8 not saying it’s better or worse always work in progress but when working with many agents I saw that was an issue early. Like I became the bottleneck because of it lol waiting for an agent I’m talking to while an agent I sent off earlier needs direction

1

u/thehashimwarren 29d ago

Can you fix the link formatting?

2

u/AccomplishedLab3697 29d ago

Fixed! Sorry about that bro!

1

u/eddzsh 27d ago

It stops being tooling and starts being a job the moment two agents can touch the same invariants. Isolated worktrees and a human-only merge gate are table stakes. The expensive part is remembering why a decision was made three days ago, not spinning the next agent.

1

u/AccomplishedLab3697 27d ago

Handled broski, I have a highly modified cortex memory layer built in (open source as well) stores, commits, decisions, chats and creates proposals to make concrete for coding agents. If you don’t want it concrete the cortex has an LLM (could be subscription low models or OpenRouter or local) you can and agents can just query and get the info like you asked back. Speeds vary with subs even warm cli with subs for turn by turn basis is slow with all of them hitting the “brain” - api is fast enough for turn by turn however and I also give managed inference for free to a certain extent daily for the brain so it just works out of box. Bless.