chadbyte/clay

What it solves

Clay provides a self-hosted, collaborative workspace for AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex. It eliminates vendor lock-in by storing sessions, knowledge, and settings as plain text on the user's local disk, allowing teams to switch between different AI vendors without losing their project history or conventions.

How it works

Clay operates as a daemon running on a local machine that acts as an adapter layer (called YOKE) between a browser-based GUI and the underlying AI agent runtimes. It integrates with the Claude Agent SDK and the Codex app-server protocol to provide a unified interface. The system stores all data in JSONL and Markdown formats, supporting multi-user access with optional OS-level isolation on Linux to enforce file permissions via the kernel.

Who it’s for

• Small to medium teams: Engineers, PMs, and designers who want a shared workspace to collaborate in real-time and share API keys.
• Solopreneurs: Developers who need persistent AI "Mates" (personas with memory) to act as a virtual team of architects and reviewers.
• Self-hosting enthusiasts: Developers who prioritize data sovereignty and want their code and session history to remain on their own hardware.

Highlights

• Persistent AI Mates: AI personas with compounding memory and specific roles that remember codebase conventions across sessions.
• Multi-Project Dashboard: A single interface to manage multiple repositories and run agents in parallel across several projects.
• Ralph Loop: An autonomous coding system that iterates on features overnight based on a prompt and a judge file.
• Structured Debates: A tool to let multiple AI Mates argue different sides of a technical decision to reach a recorded conclusion.
• Cross-Vendor Support: One-click toggling between Claude Code and Codex within the same workspace.
• PWA Support: Installable mobile app with push notifications for agent approval requests.