Torque

Torque is a local agent-orchestration workspace for terminal-native developers. Manage AI coding agents, run them in isolated git worktrees, dispatch work from a task board, and let an embedded engineer coordinate the wave from your iTerm2 Toolbelt, a browser, or a native desktop shell.

Why Torque

Coding agents are powerful but messy in practice. Each one wants its own session, its own branch, its own context window, and its own terminal history. Spinning up three at once can quickly turn into three terminals, three worktrees, three half-remembered prompts, and a lot of "where was I?" friction.

Torque puts a thin orchestration layer in front of that workflow. You define groups, drop agents and terminals into them, dispatch work through reusable actions, and watch tasks move across a built-in board. Every agent runs in its own isolated git worktree by default, so branch boundaries are enforced instead of merely hoped for.

One step further: each group can have an engineer. The engineer is Torque's orchestrator agent: it sees the board, dispatches workers, watches digests, and coordinates the next wave. It is the same idea as a designated build engineer on a small team, but for a single-user OSS workspace.

What you get:

• Visual group, agent, and terminal grid in iTerm2's Toolbelt sidebar, a browser, or a native desktop window.
• Per-agent isolated git worktrees with merge-boundary tracking.
• Reusable action templates with Jinja-rendered prompts and pipeline transitions.
• A task board with lanes, dispatch, derived subtasks, and human-review gates.
• An optional embedded engineer agent to coordinate work across an entire group.
• A torque CLI for scripting from the command line.

Quickstart

iTerm2 Toolbelt mode (recommended)

Requires macOS and iTerm2.

git clone git@github.com:runtorque/torque.git
cd torque
make deps
make install
make cli

Then in iTerm2:

1. Open Scripts → torque to launch the daemon.
2. Open View → Show Toolbelt.
3. Enable Torque from the Toolbelt gear menu.

This is the canonical Torque experience: the daemon runs under iTerm2 and the UI lives beside your terminal sessions in the Toolbelt.

Standalone browser mode

From the cloned repo, after make deps has been run once:

make standalone
make open

Standalone mode launches the daemon without requiring the Toolbelt UI and opens Torque in your default browser. It is useful when you want a wider workspace or are not using the iTerm2 sidebar for the current session.

Native desktop shell

From the cloned repo, after make cli has installed the torque command:

make desktop-deps
torque desktop

The desktop shell installs pywebview into the iTerm2-managed Python runtime and starts a native window on its own profile and port. By default it uses the desktop profile and port 18933, so it does not collide with the Toolbelt daemon on 18932.

For more install variants and runtime modes, see Getting Started and Operations.

Key concepts

Groups, agents, and terminals. A group is a workspace for one project or one focus area. It contains agents, which are long-running coding sessions in their own worktrees, and terminals, which are regular shells for ad-hoc commands and inspection. See Core concepts.

Actions and tasks. An action is a reusable prompt template: a Jinja2 file that takes a task description and renders the dispatch instructions for an agent. Tasks live on the board; you dispatch them by attaching an action and sending them to an agent. See Actions and The board.

The engineer. Each group can have an embedded engineer agent that watches the board, plans the next wave, dispatches workers, monitors digests, and asks for human input when it hits a decision boundary. The engineer is opt-in; Torque works fine without one. See Engineers.

Documentation

• Getting Started — install and create your first group, agent, and terminal.
• Core concepts — vocabulary and mental model.
• The team — Workers, Engineers, Architects, and how MCP tools are scoped per role.
• Tasks and threads — derivation as the unit of progress.
• Actions, Templates, and Pipelines — reusable prompts that compose into multi-step workflows.
• Workflow guide — the day-to-day operating loop.
• CLI reference — torque command reference.
• Troubleshooting — symptom-first recovery.

Full documentation map →

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup, test commands, and PR expectations. Bug reports and feature requests use the templates in .github/.

Status

Torque is single-user, local-first, and currently macOS + iTerm2 with a working standalone-browser fallback and a beta native desktop shell. Linux and Windows are follow-up targets: the daemon itself is portable, but the iTerm2 integration is the strongest dependency today.

The project is on version 1.1.0. See Roadmap for what's next.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.