Posted by onecommit 4 hours ago
Emdash is an open-source and provider-agnostic desktop app that lets you run multiple coding agents in parallel, each isolated in its own git worktree, either locally or over SSH on a remote machine. We call it an Agentic Development Environment (ADE).
You can see a 1 minute demo here: https://youtu.be/X31nK-zlzKo
We are building Emdash for ourselves. While working on a cap-table management application (think Stripe Atlas + Pulley), we found our development workflow to be messy: lots of terminals, lots of branches, and too much time spent waiting on Codex.
Emdash puts the terminal at the center and makes it easy to run multiple agents at once. Each agent runs as a task in its own git worktree. You can start one or a few agents on the same problem, test, and review.
Emdash works over SSH so you can run agents where your code lives and keep the parallel workflow. You can assign tickets to agents, edit files manually, and review changes.
We also spent time making task startup fast. Each task can be created in a worktree, and creating worktrees on demand was taking 5s+ in some cases. We now keep a small reserve of worktrees in the background and let a new task claim one instantly. That brought task start time down to ~500–1000ms depending on the provider. We also spawn the shell directly and avoid loading the shell environments on startup.
We believe using the providers’ native CLIs is the right approach. It gives you the full capabilities of each agent, always. If a provider starts supporting plan mode, we don't have to add that first.
We support 21 coding agent CLIs today, including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Droid, Amp, Codebuff, and more. We auto-detect what you have installed and we’re provider-agnostic by design. If there’s a provider you want that we don’t support yet, we can add it. We believe that in the future, some agents will be better suited for task X and others for task Y. Codex, Claude Code, and Gemini all have fans. We want to be agnostic and enable individuals and teams to freely switch between them.
Beyond orchestration, we try to pull most of the development loop into Emdash. You can review diffs, commit, open PRs, see CI/CD checks, and merge directly from Emdash once checks pass. When starting a task, you can pass issues from Linear, GitHub, and Jira to an agent. We also support convenience variables and lifecycle scripts so it’s easy to allocate ports and test changes.
Emdash is fully open-source and MIT-licensed.
Download for macOS, Linux or Windows (as of yesterday !), or install via Homebrew: brew install --cask emdash.
We’d love your feedback. How does your coding agent development setup look like, especially when working with multiple agents? We would want to learn more about it. Check out our repository here: https://github.com/generalaction/emdash
We’ll be around in the comments — thanks!
if agents continue to get better with RL, what is future proof about this environment or UI?
I think we all know that managing 5-10 agents ... is not pretty. Are we really landing good PRs with 100% cognitive focus from 5-10 agents? Chances are, I'm making mistakes (and I assume other humans are too)? Why not 1 agent managing 5-10 agents for you? And so on?
Most of the development loop is in bash ... so as long as agents get better at using bash (amongst other things), what happens to this in 6 months?
I don't think this is operating at a higher-level of abstraction if agents themselves can coordinate agents across worktrees, etc.
What's future-proof isn't the UI chrome, it's maintaining human visibility into the decision layer. The agents will get better at everything below that line. The line itself is the thing worth building tools around.
CLIs like claude code equally improve over time. tmux helps running remote sessions like there were local.
Why should we invest long time into your „ADE“, really?
> see their status and review / test their work
Won’t that be addressed eventually by the CLIs themselves?
Maybe you’re betting on being purchased by one of the agentic coding providers given your tool has long term value on its own?
Then tried running the Linux version on WSL2 (not ideal because the wayland server on WSL2 is slow) - doesn't work. This 404s: https://github.com/generalaction/emdash/releases/download/v0...
Grabbed the version before and got "PTY unavailable: ... was compiled against a different Node.js version using NODE_MODULE_VERSION 127, this version requires NODE_MODULE_VERSION 123".
Hope you can fix the bugs. I love Conductor on my Mac, but I need something for my WSL2 machine. Ideally Windows which can SSH into WSL2 (for UI speed) or runs on Linux itself. This is very close to what I need if you fix the bugs :).
If you're talking about shared services, that's another matter.