acryldev/acryl

ACRYL - Agent Context Relay Yielding Lifecycles. One persistent workspace, one canonical context, any coding agent.

What is ACRYL?

ACRYL is a development environment for AI coding agents — a workspace where agents like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini CLI can come and go as interchangeable workers, while the project, its context, and your work stay put. Instead of your project living inside one agent's chat window, agents live inside your project.

The core idea: You don't have to pick one agent. You can use different agents for different tasks, and ACRYL preserves the workspace, context, tasks, and handoffs between them — even for agents that don't know ACRYL exists.

Key Features

  • A canvas, not a chat window — A tabbed workspace with projects and git worktrees on the left; agent sessions, terminals, a file editor, diffs with line-by-line review comments, and a draggable kanban in the middle. Panes are tiles you can open, close, and rearrange.

  • One roster for all agents — A built-in catalog of 33 coding agents you can launch into any project, plus your own custom agent definitions. An attention queue tells you when an agent needs you, so you can run several at once without watching terminals.

  • Agents can drive the app — "Agent Control" lets an agent operate ACRYL itself (reading the accessibility tree, clicking, typing, opening panels, toggling plugins). Every mutating action needs your approval per call, is recorded in an audit log, and can be stopped with one key. From the terminal, acryl control drives a running app, and acryl doctor / acryl repair diagnose and fix an install that won't boot.

  • Everything is a plugin — Built on the Cordis framework. Plugins can be installed and hot-reloaded live without restarting, and can contribute their own canvas tab types, tools, slots, and services.

  • Blends — A complete, shareable composition of plugins — an entire opinionated environment as one unit. ACRYL itself is one Blend; you can make your own.

  • Three surfaces, one brain — Desktop app (Electron), local web (acryl web), and a terminal UI all render the same runtime with the same project model, plugins, and capabilities.

Installation

The three surfaces install separately — installing one never silently installs another.

  • Desktop GUI: DMG for macOS (Apple Silicon / Intel), installer for Windows x64, DEB for Linux (x64 and arm64).
  • CLI terminal: One curl command (no Node.js required), or via npm.
  • Local Web: acryl web starts a local web runtime and prints its URL. Not a hosted cloud service.
  • Nix: A community-contributed flake (may lag behind releases).

Core Principles

  1. Agent sessions are disposable; project context is persistent.
  2. ACRYL owns continuity; agents perform work.
  3. Canonical state is durable and agent-independent.
  4. Agent-specific context is a projection, not the source of truth.
  5. Everything practical is a plugin or replaceable capability.
  6. Capabilities are versioned, permissioned, testable, and auditable.

Architecture

ACRYL builds on an unmodified, pinned checkout of DeepSeek Harness (a separate open-source project) as its capability substrate — providing sessions, tools, PTYs, and sandboxing. That sits on the Cordis runtime, which sits on Node.js/Electron/OS. The trusted kernel stays small; new functionality arrives as versioned capability packages that can be validated, activated, observed, and rolled back without touching the core.

Note: ACRYL is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by DeepSeek.

Status & License

  • Early development: Interfaces, workflows, and packaging may change. Current version: v0.2.5.
  • License: MIT.
  • Contributing: Welcomes contributors interested in agent interoperability, persistent context, Cordis plugins, developer tooling, and related areas. Read AGENTS.md and the orientation docs before contributing.

Project Links

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