Run your AI agents like a team.
One board. You're in control.

Forkbench is a developer-directed workspace layout manager for local terminal sessions and AI coding agents. It groups your terminal tabs — where each tab holds its own terminal session — into isolated context workspaces called Threads, providing a unified backlog, visual git panel, and secure credentials management.

By segmenting terminal tabs into context-specific Thread workspaces. Instead of managing a flat bar of 20 floating terminal windows, you group tabs by context (e.g., 'auth-overhaul' or 'billing-refactor'). Each Thread holds its own active sessions, context notes, and Vault credentials, allowing you to run massive concurrent agent loops without crossing work states.

Yes — that's the whole idea. Give a Collab Thread one goal and it becomes a backlog they pull from: they claim tasks, work in parallel, and hand off, with no two on the same thing. You're the lead — you see the board, unblock anyone, and adjust the plan.

By syncing to a shared backlog database. In a local Offline Thread, your tab sessions run independently. When you promote a Thread to a Collab Thread, Forkbench overlays a backlog. Agents running in separate tabs (or even on different devices) read this backlog, claim open tickets, and coordinate their task states asynchronously so they never duplicate effort or overwrite each other's work.

Yes. Pair each Mac to your account and point a Collab Thread at one goal; agents on every machine work the same plan, claim tasks, and stay in sync. You see the whole board from any of them — or from the web on your phone.

Any agent or CLI tool you run in a terminal — Claude Code, Aider, Codex, Gemini CLI, custom scripts, and more. Forkbench sits underneath as the terminal and control surface; it doesn't replace your agents or their subscriptions, giving you complete flexibility to run whatever tool stack you prefer.

Because Forkbench sits a layer below any single vendor. Agent Teams coordinates Claude sub-agents inside one Claude session; Forkbench runs Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Aider, and your own scripts side by side on one board, brokers your secrets so none of them ever see a raw key, and reaches across every Mac you own — and the web. Use Agent Teams inside a lane if you like; Forkbench is the workspace it runs in.

Offline Threads are plain local workspaces that group your terminal tab sessions under one directory context. Collab Threads add a shared backlog so those sessions coordinate — claim tickets, hand off, and act as one team. That coordination is free on a single Mac; Forkbench Pro syncs the same board across all your Macs, and Team brings other people onto it.

With the Forkbench Scheduler, you can stage prompts across multiple active agent sessions and set a countdown timer. When your models hit API rate limit thresholds, Forkbench automatically dispatches the staged prompts the second the quota resets, allowing your agent loops to resume and run unattended without manual babysitting.

Click Download. You'll get a `.dmg` file. Open it and drag Forkbench to Applications. That's it — macOS 14 or newer, no Homebrew, no setup scripts.

Notebooks are a persistent, private store of the knowledge that guides your agents: briefs, conventions, and decisions written once and filed by notebook. You choose which notes each thread can see, and they carry across sessions and devices so nothing has to be re-explained. It is free for all signed-in Forkbench accounts.

Vault is a secure credential manager that gives you zero-read protection for your API keys, tokens, and passwords. It stores secrets safely locally. When you authorize a thread, Forkbench injects the credentials at execution time — allowing your agents to run tasks with those secrets without ever having the ability to read or exfiltrate the raw values. It is free for all signed-in accounts.

Forkbench acts as an execution broker. When an agent runs a command that needs a token (like pushing to GitHub), Forkbench injects the key directly into that specific process. The agent receives the command's outcome but never the plaintext token itself. The secret is never exposed in prompt logs, chat histories, or written to disk. For multi-device workflows, Forkbench Pro lets you securely forward credentials to other devices linked to your account, where you control exactly which agents are permitted to use them.

Collabs is how you put many agents on one goal: assemble them around a shared plan, they break it into a task backlog and claim work as they go, and a board shows you who's on what. It's free on a single Mac; Forkbench Pro syncs that board across all your Macs, and Team brings your whole crew onto it.

Fork Lab is the web link to your running agents. Check on any thread from a browser, answer a blocked agent from your phone, and queue instructions that land in the right conversation on your Mac. Part of Forkbench Pro.

On your Mac. Your repositories, terminal scrollback, and shell history never leave your machine, and your Vault secrets stay safely stored locally. Your Notebooks sync across your devices on any signed-in account, and your agents' shared plans sync across your Macs on Pro — both encrypted in transit. Vault secrets are end-to-end encrypted only when you forward them between your own devices.

Yes. tmux, vim, htop, fzf, lazygit, your shell, your aliases — anything you'd run in a regular terminal works in Forkbench. We sit underneath, not in the way.

The app is free to download and run locally. A signed-in account gives you Notebooks, Vault, and single-Mac Collabs for free. Forkbench Pro — which syncs Collabs across all your Macs, adds Fork Lab remote control, and forwards secrets between your devices — is $12/mo with a 14-day free trial, cancel anytime. Team adds shared notebooks and cross-user Collab boards with per-seat billing at $12/seat per month.

Team is Forkbench for more than one person. It brings your teammates onto the same Collab board and shared Notebooks, so everyone's machine starts from the same context — with managed per-seat billing at $12/seat per month. Your Vault secrets always stay per-user: Team shares the plan and the notes, never your keys.

Sleep Control acts as a system keep-awake utility (similar to caffeinate) built into Forkbench. You can toggle it to prevent your Mac from sleeping even when you close your laptop lid. This allows long-running CLI agents, compiler checks, or scripts running inside your terminal tab sessions to execute overnight without interruption.

No. Forkbench implements a strict zero-trust permission model. By default, local agents running in a terminal tab session have zero access to your Vault keys or Notebooks. You must explicitly authorize access to specific files or credentials from the thread's Bench interface before they are exposed to the agent runtime.

Agent Hooks are opt-in helper configurations that you can voluntarily inject into your local agent settings (like ~/.claude/settings.json). They bridge your CLI agent with Forkbench's UI, allowing the desktop client to mirror the agent's real-time thinking process or wake up the session tab when work is added to your backlog.

Today Forkbench is a native Mac app, built to be fast and feel right. Versions for other systems may follow — tell us what you run and we'll weigh it.