The ground-up rebuild of OpenBots: a native macOS app that turns Claude into a team of named teammates you hire, brief, and fence yourself — running on your own Claude Code CLI subscription. No API key, no accounts, no server; everything lives on your Mac.
Preview status, honestly stated. Chat, teammate identity, drafts, archives, search, durable history, and single live Claude replies through your local Claude Code CLI are implemented and tested. The consequential-action executor is deliberately disabled in this build: the app records exact, immutable action proposals and approvals, but does not yet execute external actions.
Why v0.5.0 looks smaller than v0.1.0
v0.1.0 (developed under the working name Agency) proved the product but outgrew its foundations. This is a deliberate rebuild, not a feature release: durable SQLite persistence on the system library with zero third-party dependencies, a stricter security boundary, honest approval semantics, and a simpler Claude sign-in. Web search, connectors and the shared vault are being reintroduced one by one on the new architecture. The version number is a promise about trajectory.
Highlights
- Six built-in characters with their own voice, memory and permissions
- Durable everything — messages, drafts, archives and approvals survive close, reopen and crashes; verified by reopen tests on every write path
- Zero dependencies — Swift 6, SwiftUI, the system SQLite; nothing else
- 1494 tests, no live calls — 513 XCTest + 981 Swift Testing, green on macOS 26 in CI and on the development machine
Runs on macOS 14, 15 and 26
Found and fixed while releasing: on macOS 14/15 the system SQLite predates 3.44 and refuses the full-text index inside triggers under a hardened schema. The app now checks the linked SQLite at open and trusts the schema only where that is needed (docs/2026-09-01-sqlite-trusted-schema-handoff.md). CI runs the full suite on both macos-15 and macos-26.
Install
Requires macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon, full Xcode 16+, and the Claude Code CLI logged into a subscription.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LorenzoColombani/openbots/main/install.sh | shOr clone, run Scripts/build-preview.sh, and open the app from .build.noindex/preview/DerivedData/Build/Products/Debug/.
Designed and developed by Lorenzo Colombani; implementation is AI-assisted under his direction and review. MIT licensed — read SECURITY.md before reporting anything security-shaped.