Show HN: Twine is a meta-harness with workflows, cross-agent memories and traces

A native macOS workspace for coordinating coding agents.

Install · Quick start · User guide · Contributing

Twine is the terminal-first collaboration layer for AI coding agents. Bring agents together through controlled workflows, visual traces, and cross-agent memory.

Twine requires macOS 26 or later on Apple Silicon.

brew install --cask standing-desks/tap/twine-ade

Then open Twine from Applications.

To install manually instead, download the .dmg from the latest release, open it, and drag Twine onto Applications.

To update a manual install, see the install notes.

Agent workflows also need at least one supported harness installed and signed in. Terminal workflows need nothing else.

This takes about a minute and needs no agent harness.

You should see the command's output in the terminal and one step for that command in the Traces panel. Selecting the step jumps to its output.

To run your first agent workflow, add another tab and choose Adversarial. Pick a harness for the implementer and for the reviewer, start the workflow, and type a task in the implementer's terminal. When the implementer submits its completion, the reviewer's terminal receives the work and either approves it or sends changes back.

A session is a named body of work in a folder. Each top-level tab in a session is a workflow. Select a built-in workflow or create your own agent graph:

Click +, then Create your own, to open the native graph editor in the new tab. Saved workflows are TOML files in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/twine/workflows (default ~/.config/twine/workflows). Copy these files to share workflows or keep them in version control. Agent instructions use native harness instruction channels; setup does not start agent work.

Common tasks, each covered in the user guide:

Advance a workflow yourself. Use Mark done… to submit a completion, review decision, or assignment on an agent's behalf. See agent workflows.

Split a terminal into up to four panes, and paste images or drop files into a pane as paths. See terminal panes.

Browse and edit files in the open folder with syntax highlighting. See files.

Change the terminal font in Twine → Settings… (⌘,), which edits ~/.config/twine/config.toml and applies changes on save. See configuration.

[terminal] font_family = "JetBrains Mono" font_size = 13.0

Inspect recorded agent activity in Traces → In Depth. Overview shows activity counts and an Inspect activity action. LLM calls include public responses/summaries, model and usage details when the harness supplies them; missing timings or request bodies remain marked as unrecorded. Show full details opens complete saved inputs and results. The storage control shows usage, pins a step, and clears completed, unpinned details. Twine keeps compact metadata in SQLite and deduplicates large details in adjacent files. Active steps and pinned details can exceed the cache budget. Native harness files remain untouched.

[traces] detail_budget_mb = 512 retention_days = 90 # Closed, unpinned workflows; 0 disables age expiry.

Saved Codex, Claude Code, Pi, and OMP conversations can recover activity for their linked steps. Recovery uses native IDs or an unambiguous prompt/time match within the same conversation. It cannot recover data absent from both the observer and native history. OpenCode and Antigravity use live observers.

A harness is the external agent CLI that fills a role. Twine finds each one by its command on your shell's PATH:

Install and authenticate harnesses separately. Model choices come from each harness's own CLI, and provider access and usage charges follow your harness configuration. Twine never edits your harness config files.

Twine is in early development. It is usable day to day, but features, integrations, and saved formats can change between releases, and there are no stability guarantees yet. The changelog lists what changed in each release.

Contributing Guide · Developer Certificate of Origin

Bug reports and feedback on real workflows are welcome in GitHub Issues. Include your macOS, Twine, and harness versions, what you expected, and what happened. For larger changes, open an issue to discuss the idea before you start. Changes reach main through pull requests.

git clone https://github.com/standing-desks/twine.git cd twine make debug open out/debug/Build/Products/Debug/Twine.app

Debug builds keep their data in out/runtime/debug/, separate from an installed copy of Twine.

make fmt # format the library and the app make check # lint and unit-test the library and the app make # list every target

make ui-test runs the UI suite and takes over the desktop while it runs.

Path Contents

macOS/ The SwiftUI and AppKit front end.

twine-core/ The Rust application library that owns behavior and saved state.

twine-bridge/ The C ABI adapter between the two.

docs/ Source for the website and guides.

The development guide covers setup, harness integration, and releases. CONTEXT.md defines the terms used in the code and UI, and AGENTS.md holds the repository conventions.

Please report vulnerabilities privately through GitHub security advisories instead of a public issue.

Thank you to AI Tinkerers Seattle for the opportunity to demo and premiere Twine. Twine's terminal emulation uses SwiftTerm.

Twine is available under the MIT License.