Goodboy

Read this when you are new here, human or agent, and want the pitch, the install steps and what ships today. Not for working conventions once you are building. Go to AGENTS.md.

You have a repo, a goal, and four CLIs open in four windows, each holding a slightly different version of the same task. By evening you have spent more time pasting the goal into the next chat than building.

Goodboy is a desktop app for macOS and Linux that holds the goal, the plan and the decisions once, then hands them to whichever agent you run next. Every turn is rebuilt from that shared record instead of resumed from a vendor's session blob, so you can stop Claude halfway, give the same task to Codex, and repeat nothing.

Open source, every feature included, no account. One connected CLI is enough to start.

Home is a board, not a chat window. Every session in the workspace sits in one of six columns: building, running, needs you, in review, done, archived. A card carries the goal, a status line, when it last moved, and how many agents are on it. From the card you open the session in your editor or in a terminal.

Every session gets its own git worktree and branch. Your main checkout is never the thing an agent edits, so several sessions run at once without fighting over the same files.

Context is a record, not scrollback. The goal, the decisions, the open questions, the plans and the running summary are rows in a SQLite file on your disk. The next agent is briefed by that file rather than by you.

Seven agent CLIs, one brief. A turn is assembled from that stored record every time, so a task is not tied to whichever provider started it. A workflow chains steps, and each step carries its own provider, model and effort, so a scouting step does not run at planning prices.

What today costs is in the header. Goodboy meters usage locally and shows the running total for the day next to the count of sessions waiting on you.

Bring the subscription you already pay for. Goodboy drives the official CLIs on your machine, on your existing plan. Three of the seven run through the OpenCode runtime, and the two that need an API key keep it in your OS credential store.

Those commands are the ones the app runs for you when you connect a provider. Login, logout and the per-provider caveats: docs/providers.md.

GitHub is the code host Goodboy expects, and six services connect on top of it: Linear, Sentry, GitLab, Jira, Bitbucket and Slack. Pull requests from GitHub and merge requests from GitLab collect in one review list, and Bitbucket brings its own pull request view. An issue from a tracker becomes a session with the goal and the branch name already filled in, and a Slack thread starts one the same way.

Every connection is optional, and each holds its token in your OS credential store. Each one covers a slice of its service rather than the whole API, and the release notes say which slice when it lands.

macOS. Intel and Apple Silicon in one universal build, signed and notarized, so it opens without the unidentified-developer warning.

brew install --cask akhayam99/tap/goodboy

Or drag the .dmg from the latest release to Applications.

Linux. x86_64 as an AppImage, a .deb or an .rpm on the same release. The packages declare libc6 (>= 2.39) and the GTK stack they link against, so apt and rpm resolve the rest. That floor means Ubuntu 24.04 and Debian 13 upward.

sudo apt install ./Goodboy_<version>_amd64.deb
sudo rpm -i Goodboy-<version>-1.x86_64.rpm
chmod +x Goodboy_<version>_amd64.AppImage

Credentials go to the freedesktop Secret Service, GNOME Keyring or KWallet, so a keyring daemon has to be running before you save a token.

Windows is a build from source for now. Security posture and the credential caveat: SECURITY.md.

Updates. On macOS an update control appears when a new release ships, and one click downloads and relaunches. Homebrew handles it too, with brew upgrade --cask goodboy. On Linux, take the new package from the release.

pnpm install
pnpm tauri:dev

Needs Node 20 or newer, pnpm 10 and a working Rust toolchain, and CI builds on Node 22. Platform prereqs: https://v2.tauri.app/start/prerequisites/. Dev-loop notes: apps/desktop/README.md.

Tauri 2 · React 19 · TypeScript · Tailwind v4 · Zustand · SQLite, in a pnpm + Turborepo monorepo: apps/desktop plus packages/{ui,core,db,types}.

Goodboy is an orchestration layer. There is no backend, there are no accounts, and what you write reaches only the services you connected yourself. A few things sit outside that sentence and are listed below with the rest: a local diagnostics file, the check for a new version, and a crash report you choose to send. SECURITY.md carries the full list.

• The app carries no telemetry. No usage pings, no opt-in switch to find later, nothing sent in the background. When a crash takes the screen down, Goodboy can fill in a GitHub issue with the error, and only your click opens it.
• The website is not the app. goodboy-ai.dev runs Google Tag Manager and Vercel's analytics and speed tools to see how the page itself is doing. Reading about Goodboy is measured. Running it is not.
• API keys and tokens stay on your machine, in your OS credential store.
• Prompts and responses travel between you and the provider you picked, and nowhere else.
• What you send to a connected service reaches that service. A comment posted to GitHub is a comment on GitHub, and its token travels with the request. Local storage does not mean nothing leaves.
• Local persistence is one SQLite file, ~/.goodboy/data.db: workspaces, sessions, agents, messages, context, plans, local usage records, skills, settings. Cleared when you ask, and not before.
• Every launch appends a few lines to ~/.goodboy/boot-breadcrumbs.log. A timestamp, a launch id, the boot phase and how long that phase took. The phase and the detail are matched against a fixed set of allowed values before the line is written, so no path, argument or credential can reach it, and the file never leaves your machine. SECURITY.md has the allowlist, the file mode and the rotation.
• A release build asks GitHub whether a newer version exists. It requests the update manifest published with the releases: once as a window opens, then again when that window regains focus or becomes visible, and once an hour while it stays visible. Only those later checks are spaced half an hour apart, the one at open is not, so launching and clicking into the app sends two requests. That is the only network request Goodboy makes on its own with nothing connected at all. It carries no data about you, and an update it finds is verified against the signing key shipped in the app before anything is installed.
• Reporting a crash opens a prefilled GitHub issue in your browser. When the app stops rendering it offers a Report button, and nothing leaves until you press it. The link carries the app version, the error message, and at most 1,500 characters of the part that says where in the app it broke, with home folders shortened to ~ while project and file paths stay as they are. GitHub receives that text as the prefilled page loads, not when you submit it, and the whole link is capped at 4,096 bytes so a long report is trimmed further to fit. Submitting the form is what turns it into a public issue. Close the tab and nothing is filed.

If Goodboy disappeared tomorrow, your data would be untouched, because it was never ours.

Goodboy ships Goodboy. Releases are decided, built, verified and drafted by an autonomous loop of agents, with a human reviewing after rather than before. Every pull request is checked by a different agent than the one that wrote it, and anything not yet exercised against a live service is named in the release notes. The loop answers to a written floor it cannot edit on its own authority: it never touches signing material or secrets, never force-pushes, never publishes without a human, and stops rather than guess.

Try it. If something breaks, feels off or is missing, open an issue: the bug control in the top right, Settings, "Report an issue" in the command palette, or straight on GitHub. The in-app form sends the app version, a type, an area, a title, your notes, and any images you attach. Nothing else. Half-formed thoughts welcome, and "this feels wrong" is a valid bug report. Issues are triaged every release cycle, so you get an answer even when it is "not yet". A request for something the project refuses on principle, tracking above all, gets a written no rather than silence.

• docs/concepts.md: what every object in the app is
• docs/providers.md: connecting and disconnecting a CLI
• docs/tone-of-voice.md: how Goodboy talks
• DESIGN.md: how it looks and behaves
• CONVENTIONS.md · AGENTS.md: contributor rules
• Roadmap and the delivery organization live in goodboy-atlas, a private repository. The app never depends on it, and contributing never requires it.

MIT © Amin Khayam