An operating system for AI workers. Plant agents, group them into teams, and supervise the whole ecosystem through a Slack-like interface. Silent while they work, unmissable when one needs you. Local-first, one command to start.
The moment you run more than one autonomous agent, the tooling turns against you. Every dashboard lights up like a switchboard. Every tool call pings. Twelve terminal panes scroll faster than you can read. So you do the rational thing and stop looking — right up until the one agent that is actually blocked sits waiting, and nobody notices.
The problem was never the agents. It was an attention model that treats work as news. TheOrchard flips the rule: an agent quietly working is not an event. Only a blocked, broken, or escalating agent earns your attention — and when one does, it is impossible to miss.
Agents that have what they need are silent. The one that needs you is unmissable.
A living ecosystem, not a task queue. A team channel, not a wall of terminals. One honest signal, not a switchboard.
A Tree is a single Claude Code session with a Plot: the directory it works in, its sandbox. Plant one, give it a Seed — a reusable role of system prompt, model, and autonomy — and it goes to work. Plant the same Seed again whenever you need that role.
A Grove is a team of Trees sharing a channel. They message each other, split work, and escalate to you through a Slack-like interface. You supervise a whole team from one conversation instead of babysitting a wall of terminals.
Every signal has exactly one honest meaning. A pulsing dot means an agent is working and needs nothing. An orange badge means blocked or broken — act. A quiet badge means unread. No tray at all means nothing needs you anywhere. Absence is the all-clear.
Every blocked agent across all your sessions — permissions, errors, escalations — pinned to the top of the sidebar with inline Allow and Deny. When it is empty it disappears entirely, so its presence always means real work is waiting on you.
TheOrchard runs on your hardware, against your repositories, writing to a local append-only SQLite event log. It binds to localhost; the browser is just a window onto it. No cloud sees your source or your prompts.
Lights up like a switchboard the moment agents start working. You learn to ignore it, then you miss the one alert that mattered.
Shows you raw output, not meaning. Twelve scrolling panes is not supervision — it is surveillance you cannot act on.
Runs jobs to completion on a trigger. It does not hold a live conversation, ask for permission mid-task, or let you steer.
Tells you what already happened. TheOrchard is where the work happens and where you intervene while it still matters.
Your code and prompts leave your machine. TheOrchard keeps the whole ecosystem local by design.
Root an agent in a directory, pick a Seed, and set its autonomy — Ask, Auto-edits, Plan, or Full autonomy. One honest amber warning on bypass, no nag dialogs.
Group Trees into a team that shares a channel. Set autonomy per member, mixed-trust if you want it. They message each other, coordinate, and escalate to you.
Let them run. A busy team stays silent until one agent genuinely needs you — then it surfaces in the Needs-You tray with Allow and Deny inline. Triage without opening a single session.
Every message, tool call, permission, and cost datum is an ordered event in the log. Bypass skips approval, never observability. Reload-proof: nothing re-alarms, nothing gets lost.
Three, ten, twenty sessions in parallel. Each one is fine alone; together they are a wall of noise you cannot triage.
Every tool call pinged you. You muted it. Now you miss the permission prompt that actually blocks real work.
Someone will ask what an agent did and when. You need an append-only record of every action, not a scrollback buffer.
Client code, proprietary repos, air-gapped constraints. A hosted agent cloud is a non-starter; local-first is the requirement.
No setup theater. Install, build, start — it binds to localhost, opens your browser, and the whole ecosystem lives on your machine.
Bypass skips approval, never observability — every action a fully autonomous agent takes still lands in the append-only event log. A pending permission survives a reload into the tray; replayed history never re-badges. Nothing re-alarms, nothing gets lost.
Most tools compete on how much they can show you. TheOrchard competes on how little it has to.
TheOrchard comes from the same team that ships production AI systems for VallySeed clients. The attention model is not a design theory — it is what we needed to supervise real agents doing real work without burning out.
The event log is the spine. Every signal is a pure fold over an ordered log, which is why a pending permission survives a reload, replay never re-alarms, and the whole attention model is testable in plain Node.
Anyone can add more panels and more badges. The hard, valuable thing is a tool that stays silent when it should and is unmissable when it must be. That restraint is the product.
Let's discuss how AI can create measurable advantage for your organization. No pitch decks — just a conversation.