A personal operator that runs in your command.
Assistant is a desktop app that runs a fleet of Codex subagents as your personal operator. Chat directly with Codex, while scanners and an orchestrator proactively turn your context and goals into work — all kept in a sandboxed approvals queue under your full control.
The problem
Capable coding agents can run autonomously, but giving them full freedom leads to chaos: work happens in parallel across repos and branches, decisions get made without your input, and by the time you notice something wrong, half a dozen agents have already executed on bad assumptions. Real autonomy requires guardrails — the agent should do the work, but you must stay in command.
What Assistant does
Assistant collapses the operator experience into a single macOS desktop app. You chat with Codex in real time, asking it to draft plans or iterate on work. In parallel, a set of proactive scanners — watching your calendar, email, repos, focus windows, and health metrics — feed context into an orchestrator. The orchestrator pairs that context with your goals and dispatches subagents (nine specialized workers running behind the scenes) to turn analysis into actionable work. Every action — every repo write, every task dispatch, every outbound decision — waits in an approvals queue before it executes. Agents do the work, you stay in command.
What makes it different
- Guarded autonomy. The agent workspace is sandboxed. Codex reaches app state only through a loopback MCP server. Every outward action passes through an approvals queue — you review before execution.
- Nine specialized subagents. Scanners run continuously (calendar, email, repos, focus state). An orchestrator synthesizes that input into bounded Trials. Each trial spins up domain-specific subagents for code, planning, testing, and review.
- Direct Codex chat. You sign in with your ChatGPT plan account — no API keys to manage. The app maintains a live conversation with Codex while the agent loop runs in parallel.
- Task board and plan hierarchy. Work appears as tasks on a Kanban board, organized into a 5-tier plan hierarchy. Immutable trial records let you audit every decision the orchestrator made.
- Modern stack. Electrobun 1.16 (Bun + system webview), React 19 + Vite, Tailwind 4. Monorepo layout with shared packages for desktop and host integration.
Status
Assistant is in active development. The core architecture — sandboxed subagents, approvals queue, scanner infrastructure — is in place. The roadmap includes release automation, workspace recovery improvements, and enhanced briefing synthesis from the proactive loop. Expect the first public release in late 2026.