Hi HN, I'm keane. Orbital is an open-source desktop app for running AI agents in a managed environment. Been building it for two months while holding a day job. Solo dev, mac and windows installers on the release page.
Why this exists:
- I loved Claude Projects, but I couldn't let an agent update the project, and it didn't live on my machine. Cowork Projects now can — but only Claude, closed source.
- I loved OpenClaw, but I had no control over what it was doing on my behalf.
Neither was the thing I actually wanted.
The thing I actually wanted is rooted in a belief about where agent-human interaction is going: from micromanagement to delegation.
Micromanagement — where most of us are today. You give a specific task. You hand-hold the agent, watch it work, provide context when it asks, correct it when it drifts. You're guiding an intern.
Delegation — what I want. It's handing work to a colleague the way you would when you leave a company: you give them all the context, describe the objective, set the boundaries, and then let go. Maybe they check in periodically, but you don't watch every keystroke.
For delegation to work, the agent needs a place to live. Not a session. A "project".
What a project is in Orbital:
- A workspace folder
- Persistent human-editable memory that survives restarts
- A budget cap
- A sandbox
- An autonomy preset (supervised / check-in / hands-off)
- Approval gates on write-risk tool calls
- A shared space for sub-agent coordination. The management agent is an autonomous agent I wrote; sub-agents (Claude Code, Codex, Goose, Cline) are discovered via SDK/ACP/PTY on the system path and called with separate context windows so their output doesn't bleed back into the main one.
The project is the unit you delegate. Everything else — approvals, budgets, memory, boundaries — are the affordances that make delegation actually safe.
Everything is transparent. Everything, from input to output, is on your machine. The only thing that leaves is the LLM API call.
Where this fits relative to other things:
- Claude/Cowork Projects: closest mental model, but you can't dispatch other agents like Codex to work in parallel. Exclusive to Claude.
- OpenClaw / Hermes: session-centric or agent-centric. Orbital is project-centric. Your project can delegate to them as sub-agents (planned).
What's real today. 335 commits over two months. Desktop installers for mac and windows. Used daily for a month — including to run my own launch prep. There's a distilled marketing-agent skill inside the repo that reads my calendar and drafts the next day's tasks, which is how I'm shipping this at all while holding a day job.
What's not there yet. Linux sandbox. Native mobile app (today it's LAN QR pairing plus an optional relay for remote supervision). Agent marketplace. Cross-project coordination with approval cascades. Adaptive autonomy.
Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the sub-agent handoff, the sandbox trade-offs, or anything else.
Why this exists:
- I loved Claude Projects, but I couldn't let an agent update the project, and it didn't live on my machine. Cowork Projects now can — but only Claude, closed source.
- I loved OpenClaw, but I had no control over what it was doing on my behalf.
Neither was the thing I actually wanted.
The thing I actually wanted is rooted in a belief about where agent-human interaction is going: from micromanagement to delegation.
Micromanagement — where most of us are today. You give a specific task. You hand-hold the agent, watch it work, provide context when it asks, correct it when it drifts. You're guiding an intern.
Delegation — what I want. It's handing work to a colleague the way you would when you leave a company: you give them all the context, describe the objective, set the boundaries, and then let go. Maybe they check in periodically, but you don't watch every keystroke.
For delegation to work, the agent needs a place to live. Not a session. A "project".
What a project is in Orbital:
- A workspace folder
- Persistent human-editable memory that survives restarts
- A budget cap
- A sandbox
- An autonomy preset (supervised / check-in / hands-off)
- Approval gates on write-risk tool calls
- A shared space for sub-agent coordination. The management agent is an autonomous agent I wrote; sub-agents (Claude Code, Codex, Goose, Cline) are discovered via SDK/ACP/PTY on the system path and called with separate context windows so their output doesn't bleed back into the main one.
The project is the unit you delegate. Everything else — approvals, budgets, memory, boundaries — are the affordances that make delegation actually safe.
Everything is transparent. Everything, from input to output, is on your machine. The only thing that leaves is the LLM API call.
Where this fits relative to other things:
- Claude/Cowork Projects: closest mental model, but you can't dispatch other agents like Codex to work in parallel. Exclusive to Claude.
- OpenClaw / Hermes: session-centric or agent-centric. Orbital is project-centric. Your project can delegate to them as sub-agents (planned).
What's real today. 335 commits over two months. Desktop installers for mac and windows. Used daily for a month — including to run my own launch prep. There's a distilled marketing-agent skill inside the repo that reads my calendar and drafts the next day's tasks, which is how I'm shipping this at all while holding a day job.
What's not there yet. Linux sandbox. Native mobile app (today it's LAN QR pairing plus an optional relay for remote supervision). Agent marketplace. Cross-project coordination with approval cascades. Adaptive autonomy.
Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the sub-agent handoff, the sandbox trade-offs, or anything else.