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.
o8 is a macOS app for running a team of coding agents the way a staff engineer runs a team of people: you delegate the work, a governance layer reviews it, and you approve what ships. It's the layer underneath the agent IDEs — 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 app is free with your own keys — bring Claude or Codex and run it. There's no crippled tier and no trial. A paid Founding Operator edition funds the build and switches on a managed layer (we run the fast inference for you) for those who want it instant and hands-off — but every capability is in the free app.
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.