What is o8?
o8 is a control room for autonomous engineering — one orchestrator dispatches a fleet of coding agents, a governance layer reviews every diff, and nothing risky merges without your sign-off.
The product files tracked by this page changed after o8 v0.1.662. Use this as a dated reference while the current documentation is refreshed.
o8 is a local-first desktop app for running a team of coding agents from one durable conversation. You choose the orchestrator that holds the goal, route each scoped packet to the supported CLI and model that fit the work, and keep every worker inside the same isolation, review, and approval system. It's the layer underneath the agent interfaces — not another place to type code, but the room you run them from.
The shape of it
Most tools put one agent in your editor. o8 puts an orchestrator in charge of many:
- The orchestrator plans the work and dispatches it to a fleet of coding agents — Claude, Codex, Gemini, and others — each in its own isolated git worktree.
- A governance layer reviews every diff before it can land: risk is classified by what the change touches, and the dangerous changes get a second, independent review.
- Nothing merges unreviewed — and nothing risky merges without your sign-off. Autonomy stays comfortable because the gate is the product, not an afterthought. Every diff is reviewed before it can merge; a standard diff clears on a passing review, while high-risk work is escalated to a second, independent reviewer and held for you.
The surfaces
o8 is one governed surface seen from several angles:
| Surface | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Control Room | The IDE side — sessions, the orchestrator chat, and your o8.md workspace. |
| Agents & Dispatch | Hand real work to the fleet: missions, isolated worktrees, review, approval. |
| The Brain | A queryable map of how your project actually works — organizational memory. |
| Canvas | A spatial workspace for arranging work and media. |
| Symon | The voice operator — talk to o8, dictate, and drive it hands-free. |
What it costs
The whole open-source app is free forever with the model subscriptions and keys you already use. Each installation also gets a limited hosted model allowance, provisioned on demand the first time you invoke an o8-hosted model; no sign-in is required. Sign-in is for portable, account-backed services such as sync, the web console, mobile relay, and Pro. Optional Pro provides our most generous daily fair-use limits and gives people who do not want to maintain a fork the supported path to deeper Canvas customization.
o8 is the orchestration layer that handles the boring production work end to end, so you can step back from the tools and run the room.