Circuit

A substrate-agnostic interface for directing distributed intelligence.

Circuit treats a fleet of agents as one directed process rather than a queue of requests. Work is decomposed into units that run in parallel, and when the system reaches something it cannot settle on its own it escalates — surfacing the decision to you instead of guessing. The interface is built around watching that happen: a grid of LEDs for the workers, a schema whose nodes you tap to zoom into their children, and a hand of cards for the questions the system needs answered.

The orchestrator is substrate-agnostic. The same cascade runs against Claude in the cloud or against Apple's on-device Foundation Models, chosen by a toggle in Settings; nothing above the provider boundary changes.

Status

The canonical toy model, archived. This repository is Circuit v1 — the build demoed in January 2026, the LED Grid version — preserved as it stood on 2026-01-21 at the end of its last working session. It is not maintained.

A toy model by construction: two weeks of work, state living in view models, no durable memory beneath the cascade. Canonical anyway — it is the build that was demoed and the build that was finished, and the interface idiom the project is known for starts here rather than in its successor.

Development continued in Circuitv2, the orchestration monorepo that succeeded it, also archived and public.

The full session history is intact: 77 commits, 2026-01-07 through 2026-01-21. The one alteration is that a since-revoked Anthropic API key, which had been committed as a hardcoded @AppStorage default, has been blanked everywhere it appeared. Messages, dates, and sequence are untouched.

Layout

• HomeView.swift — the circuit grid; each card is a saved cascade
• CircuitView.swift — the canvas: prompt, run, and the live cascade surface
• OrchestratorViewModel.swift — orchestration state machine, from detectingMode through decomposition, dispatch, validation, and approval
• Cascade/ — the demo's signature surface: LEDGrid and LEDDot (worker states as a histogram-painted grid), CapsuleState (the schema compressing to a capsule while the cascade runs and expanding again when it finishes), GatheringAnimationView and GestatingSchemaView, SchemaCardView
• Escalation/ — the hand: questions arrive as cards in a horizontal carousel with peek and snap, answered in place or swiped away, with blocking cards that refuse to be dismissed. v2 renamed this surface TCGHand and added the vertical play/discard axis; the idiom starts here
• Schema/ — the readable schema tree: deterministic color rotation, HSB shading for children, flow layout, serif typography
• CascadeManager.swift, CascadeSession.swift, CircuitStorage.swift — session lifecycle and persistence
• CodeFilesView.swift — a file browser behind a long-press on a circuit card. Circuit's design holds that the Director never reads code and never speaks in software-engineering concepts; this was the toy model's escape hatch from that rule, and it went in as the last commit before the demo. An honest measure of how far the January build had actually got from the IDE

Building

The only dependency is cascade-sdk, referenced as a local Swift package at ../cascade-sdk. Clone the two side by side or the project will not resolve:

parent/
├── Circuit/
└── cascade-sdk/

git clone https://github.com/angelsbrood/Circuit.git
git clone https://github.com/angelsbrood/cascade-sdk.git
open Circuit/CircuitMinimal.xcodeproj

Build with Cmd+B. Targets iOS 26.0 and macOS 26.0 — the on-device orchestration mode needs the FoundationModels framework. Supply your own Anthropic API key in Settings on first run; there is no key in this repository.

Note the app target is named CircuitMinimal, not Circuit. That was its working name throughout v1 and it has been left alone rather than rewritten after the fact — the history says CircuitMinimal, so the project does too.

CLAUDE.md is preserved as a period artifact and is stale in places; it describes an earlier single-view design that the home screen had already replaced by the time of the demo.

See also

• cascade-sdk — the Swift runtime underneath, archived at the same point
• Circuitv2 — where the work continued
• cassiespiral.com/work/circuit

License

MIT — see LICENSE.