TenonSupervise agents you did not have to orchestrate

A native macOS terminal workspace for running several CLI coding agents at once. They keep their own harness and their own PTY. You keep the judgment.

Install Tenon

What Tenon is

Write a plugin

The Tenon mark — a peg through a mortise

A real terminal, first

Every pane is a libghostty surface with native keyboard, mouse, clipboard, focus and resize. Agents run in real PTYs under their own CLI. Nothing is re-implemented, proxied, or replayed.

The spatial canvas

Five questions, one window

What changed since I last looked, what needs me now, what evidence backs that claim, what is blocked or drifting, and what can safely wait.

Supervision, not orchestration

Panes that stay put

A 12 × 12 grid per tab. Split, drag to swap, resize any shared edge, press Escape to undo the whole gesture. A pane keeps its process through every move, tab switch and relaunch.

Workspaces, tabs, panes

Agents can ask instead of stalling

An agent in a pane can put a real question with typed choices in front of you, and read back what you picked — without writing into anyone's terminal.

Running agents

One governed way in

51 canonical contracts. Every finite request from a plugin, the CLI or an agent is checked against audience, declared uses, capability and scope before it runs. Naming an intent never grants authority.

All intents

Extensible without a private door

Plugins are a directory with a manifest and a main.js, hot-reloaded on save. They see exactly one global. Bundled plugins get the same surface third-party ones do.

Writing a plugin

Why this exists

You can already run five coding agents at once. The limit was never how many processes your machine will start — it is how many workstreams one person can follow, and then accurately re-enter after looking away.

Tenon is built for that limit. It does not plan work, spawn agents, schedule them, or drive their keyboards; those belong to the harness you already chose. It gives their operator one window where parallel work stays legible, and every condensed claim keeps a direct path back to the transcript, diff, command result, or test receipt it came from.

# Tenon opens and behaves like a terminal. Start there.
⌘T          new tab — one full-size terminal
⌘D  ⇧⌘D     split the active pane left/right, top/bottom
⌘K          the command palette

Each terminal Tenon opens knows which pane it is, so the agent inside it can label its own tab, ask you a question, or open a file beside itself:

tenon-cli rename "Fixing the token refresh race"
tenon-cli intent send agent.ask.v1 --input '{"question":"Ship it?"}'

Pre-alpha

Tenon is pre-alpha and its interfaces still change between builds. Releases are marked pre-release for that reason. The terminal workspace, spatial canvas, plugin and intent runtime, CLI, command palette, automations and Agent Lens are implemented; the cross-session Attention Inbox and evidence-linked context capsules described in the vision are not yet built.