Forkbench

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Connecting your agents

Any agent you can start in a terminal already runs here, with nothing configured. Connecting one is what lets it read the board, claim work, use the notes you granted, and run a command with a key it never sees.

Which agents connect in one click

Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI and Antigravity CLI. Open Settings, then Integrations. Forkbench finds the ones you have installed and connects each with a single switch.

  • We touch our own entry and nothing else in your agent's configuration. Every other server and setting you have there is left exactly as it was.
  • Start a fresh agent session afterwards. An agent reads its configuration when it starts, so one that was already running will not see the connection.
  • Anything else still works. Aider, your own scripts, a shell loop: they run as terminal programs like they always did, and they can reach the same board through the fb command line, which is present in every tab with nothing to install.

What a connected agent gets

Three sets of tools, all scoped to the Thread the tab belongs to. Move the tab to another Thread and they address that one instead.

  • The board. Read the objective and the backlog, claim a ready task, leave progress, raise a blocker, open a discussion, report a task finished. This is what lets several agents split one objective without stepping on each other.
  • The notes. Read, and where you allowed it, revise the notes and notebooks you granted that Thread. Plus write its own working notes, which live with the Thread.
  • The keys. See which secret names are available here, then run the command that needs one. The value is never part of the answer, so it does not reach the prompt, the command line or the transcript.

In your agent's configuration these appear as three entries named forkbench, forkbench-teamwork and forkbench-secret. If you are ever wondering whether the connection landed, that is what to look for.

What connecting does not hand over

  • Your library. An agent sees the notes granted to its Thread. It cannot list, search or read the rest of your Notebooks, and it is not told how many there are.
  • Your other Threads. There is no way to address a board the tab is not in.
  • A secret you have not granted, or a granted secret's value.
  • The right to call its own work done. An agent reports a task finished. Accepting it is a click you make.

Worth saying plainly, because it is easy to read more into this than it says: none of the above constrains what the agent process can touch. It runs as you, with your filesystem rights, exactly as it would in any terminal. Forkbench governs what Forkbench holds. The full boundary is on the security page.

Two optional helpers

Both are off until you turn them on, and both work by adding a small entry to your agent's own settings file, the same file you would edit by hand.

  • Live agent prompts shows a question or a proposed plan in the Forkbench window the moment the agent asks it, rather than only once you switch to that tab.
  • Wake fast path lets an agent that just finished a turn notice that something is waiting for it, a teammate's update, a comment, a reply, and keep going instead of going idle. That is what wakes a session when work lands on the backlog.

Three things hold for both, and they are the point:

  • We merge, we do not overwrite. We edit only our own marked entry and leave every other hook you have alone.
  • User-level settings only, never a project's local settings file.
  • Deleting the entry is safe. The fast path is a convenience; losing it just means Forkbench falls back to its normal way of noticing an agent has gone quiet.

Turning it off

The same switch in Settings, then Integrations, disconnects an agent, and Reset removes everything Forkbench wrote across all of them. The agent keeps working as a terminal program: it loses the board, the notes and the keys, not your setup.

Is there an API?

No public HTTP API today. There are two supported ways in, and both are scoped to the Thread the terminal belongs to: the tools above, and the fb command line. Between them a script can read a backlog, file work, report it finished and run a credentialed command, which covers most of what people ask an API for.

Everything the Mac app sends to our servers is account, billing and sync, described on Security and Privacy. If you are building something those two surfaces cannot carry, tell us what it is at [email protected].

When it does not take

The agent does not see the board

Check the switch in Settings, then Integrations, and start a new agent session. An existing session will not pick a new connection up.

It sees the board but no notes or secrets

Those are granted per Thread, and nothing is granted by default. Grant the note or the secret to this Thread, and the agent has it on its next call.

It worked, then the tab moved

A tab carries the Thread it is in. Move it and the same tools address the new board, with a different set of notes and secrets. That is intended: ask the agent to re-read what it can see rather than treating the old set as withdrawn.

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