An agent-driven desktop shell where the agent decides what you see.

Early development — not ready for production use. The API and protocol surface are still settling; expect breaking changes between commits.

Aethon embeds the pi coding agent inside a Tauri 2 desktop shell and renders its output as live, interactive UI via the A2UI protocol. The interface is not a fixed IDE layout — it's a canvas the agent populates dynamically. Skills bring their own components, themes control the look, the agent decides the layout.

The name comes from Greek mythology: Αἴθων, one of the horses that pulled Helios's sun chariot. The blazing one that shapes what you see.

• Multi-tab workspace — top-strip agent tabs (one pi conversation each) plus a bottom-panel terminal with sub-tabs: a read-only "Agent bash" stream and zero-or-more interactive PTY shells (xterm.js + WebGL, full TUI / 256-color / true-color). Focus-aware ⌘T, ⌘1–⌘9 jump, ⌘W close, ⌘⌥T reopen.
• Native shell integration — system tray + macOS menu, auto-updater (tauri-plugin-updater against GitHub Releases), persistent chat history / tabs / themes / projects / ~/.aethon/config.toml, per-tab pi session continuity.
• Agent-controlled UI — themes (aethon.registerTheme or ~/.aethon/themes/*.json) drive the whole palette including terminal ANSI; any A2UI built-in (composites or app-root overlays like command-palette, notification-stack, settings-panel, search-panel) is overridable via aethon.registerComponent. One built-in layout (workstation); extensions register more via aethon.registerLayout.
• Agent ↔ shell sharing — four-value shareMode (private / read / read-write / read-write-trusted) per shell, clickable badge to cycle. Bridge surface aethon.shells.{list, read, write} exposes scrollback (forward-only, privacy floor enforced Rust-side) and keystroke injection (Allow/Deny prompt per write unless trusted).
• Extensibility — drop a .ts into ~/.aethon/extensions/ for hot-reload, or npm install --prefix ~/.aethon/skills <pkg> for npm-distributed extensions (manifest via package.json#aethon); project-local extensions discovered from cwd up to its git root. Extensions register slash commands, keybindings, menu items, event routes, layouts, A2UI components, and themes — all reported back in the runtime snapshot.
• Built-in slash commands — /clear, /help, /theme, /model, /reset, /terminal, /extensions, /sidebar, /layout, /project. Unknown commands fall through to pi.

See SPEC.md for the full status checklist and CHANGELOG.md for release notes.

Requires Nix with flakes enabled. With direnv, the dev shell activates automatically when you cd into the directory.

nix develop          # enter the dev shell (rust toolchain + bun + tauri CLI)
bun install          # install JS deps
dev                  # launch the app with hot reload

Bring your own LLM key — pi reads ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / OPENAI_API_KEY / equivalents from the environment. See pi's docs for the full multi-provider setup.

The flake also exposes a distribution package and overlay:

nix build .#aethon
nix run .#aethon

Downstream flakes can consume overlays.default, which provides pkgs.aethon. The package follows nixpkgs' Tauri pattern (cargo-tauri.hook + fetchNpmDeps) and uses package-lock.json as the reproducible npm dependency input for Nix builds.

graph TD
    subgraph aethon["Aethon"]
        TS["Tauri Shell (Rust)\nwindows · tray + menu · file watch · spawn agent"]
        PA["Pi Agent (bun bin)\npi-ai · tools · skills · exts"]
        subgraph react["React Frontend (Vite)"]
            R["A2UI Renderer\n19 primitives + scoped templates"]
            L["default-layout\nsidebar · canvas · terminal · …"]
        end

        TS -- "stdin JSON lines\nuser / UI events" --> PA
        PA -- "stdout JSON lines\nA2UI components + responses" --> TS
        TS <-- "Tauri IPC" --> react
    end

The default layout is a skill (src/skills/default-layout/). Replacing it requires no React changes — just register a different layout payload via aethon.setLayout(...).

aethon/
├── src/                 # React frontend (entry: src/main.tsx)
├── src-tauri/           # Rust Tauri shell (lib + helpers + watcher)
├── agent/               # Pi agent bridge (run as a bun subprocess)
├── docs/aethon-agent/   # Bundled reference docs the agent reads
├── examples/            # Pi extensions + extension packages (reference)
├── flake.nix            # Nix dev environment, package, and overlay
├── bun.lock             # Bun lockfile (used by `bun install` in the devshell)
├── package-lock.json    # npm dependency snapshot for reproducible Nix builds
└── package.json         # Frontend deps + tauri CLI

For agent-side authoring docs (the API surface, A2UI components, extension recipes), see docs/aethon-agent/. The same files ship inside the binary as bundled resources so the agent can read them at runtime.

For repository conventions and architecture deep-dives, see CLAUDE.md.

RELEASING.md walks through generating an updater signing keypair, configuring GitHub Actions secrets, and cutting a release that the in-app updater can consume.

MIT © James Brink

_{Aethon is independent of and not affiliated with Anthropic. Pi is © its respective authors.}