tend

A local, always-on desktop workbench that unifies AI agent sessions across multiple repositories into a single view with live status, needs-input alerts, one-action activation, paired companion terminals, a per-project scratchpad, and automatic workspace persistence.

Built with Tauri 2 (Rust backend) + Svelte 5 (frontend) + xterm.js (terminal rendering).

Quickstart

See the full developer quickstart for detailed instructions.

Prerequisites

• Rust stable >= 1.80 (rustup)
• Node.js 20 LTS+
• pnpm 9.x
• Tauri 2 system deps (WebKitGTK, etc. — see Tauri prerequisites)
• SQLite 3.38+ headers

Build and run

pnpm install
cargo fetch
pnpm tauri dev

Run tests

# Backend (Rust)
cargo test

# Frontend (Svelte + TypeScript)
pnpm check        # type-check
pnpm test         # vitest

# Lints
cargo clippy --workspace -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --check
cargo deny check bans

# E2E (requires tauri-driver)
pnpm e2e

Architecture

tend/
  protocol/       # Shared daemon IPC wire types (serde enums)
  src-tauri/      # Rust backend: PTY management, SQLite, daemon IPC, Tauri commands
  cli/            # CLI wrapper: `tend run` — launches agents under PTY, registers with workbench
  src/            # Svelte 5 frontend: session list, split view, scratchpad, alerts
  tests/e2e/      # Playwright E2E specs

The backend owns all session lifecycles, spawning agents under PTYs via portable-pty and running per-session actor tasks on Tokio. Sessions started outside the workbench connect via a length-prefixed JSON daemon IPC protocol over a Unix-domain socket.

For the full specification, plan, and technical decisions, see specs/001-cross-repo-workbench/.

Known v1 limitations

• Sessions started without tend run (or without cooperating IPC) will not appear in the workbench.
• Remote sessions (SSH, cloud workstations, WSL-to-Windows) are not supported.
• No VS Code / editor companion — terminal only.
• Scratchpads are plain text with light markdown; no images or attachments.
• Activity summary uses a ring-buffer last-line heuristic; no LLM summarization.
• Workbench-owned sessions become read-only mirrors after a workbench restart (PTY fd does not survive process restart in v1).

Each limitation is tracked as a post-v1 enhancement in research.md section 16.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0; you pick.