torque

Torque

Torque is a local agent-orchestration workspace for terminal-native developers. Manage AI coding agents, run them in isolated git worktrees, dispatch work from a kanban board, and let an embedded engineer coordinate the wave — from a native desktop window, your browser, or your iTerm2 Toolbelt.

Why Torque

Coding agents are powerful but messy in practice. Each one wants its own session, its own branch, its own context window, and its own terminal history. Spinning up three at once can quickly turn into three terminals, three worktrees, three half-remembered prompts, and a lot of "where was I?" friction.

Torque puts a thin orchestration layer in front of that workflow. You define groups, drop agents and terminals into them, dispatch work through reusable actions, and watch tasks move across a built-in kanban board. Every agent runs in its own isolated git worktree by default, so branch boundaries are enforced instead of merely hoped for.

One step further: each group can have an engineer. The engineer is Torque's orchestrator agent — it reads the board, dispatches workers, watches digests, merges finished branches, and coordinates the next wave. It is the same idea as a designated build engineer on a small team, but for a single-user OSS workspace.

What you get:

• A visual group, agent, and terminal grid in a native desktop window, a browser, or the iTerm2 Toolbelt sidebar.
• Automatic git worktrees per agent, with checkpointing, diff tracking, and engineer-driven merges back to your base branch.
• A built-in kanban board with lanes, drag-and-drop, derived subtasks, and human-review gates.
• One-click task dispatch: pick a task, pick an action, and Torque spawns an agent in a fresh worktree with the rendered prompt already sent.
• An optional embedded engineer agent that orchestrates dispatch, review, and merge across an entire group without you babysitting each worker.
• Reusable action templates with Jinja-rendered prompts and pipeline transitions.
• A torque CLI for scripting from the command line.

How agents stay in their lane

Two pieces of plumbing make multi-agent orchestration safe:

Scoped MCP tools via env-var injection. When Torque spawns an agent it writes a per-agent .mcp.json (or .codex/config.toml) with the TORQUE_CELL_ID env var baked in. Every MCP request the agent makes carries that cell id as an X-Torque-Cell-Id header, and the daemon uses it to filter the tool list before it leaves the server. A worker only sees the torque_* reporting tools. An engineer additionally sees engineer_* tools scoped to its own group — it physically cannot enumerate another group's journal. An architect gets architect_* tools further scoped per actor. There is no override flag; scope is the contract. → MCP scoping

Hooks for live work tracking. For Claude Code and Codex workers, Torque installs SessionStart, PreToolUse, PostToolUse, and Stop hooks that POST to a local /events endpoint. Every tool call, every progress report, every session boundary streams back into the daemon in real time. That feed drives the activity badges on agent cells, the engineer's event digest, the worklog, and the auto-checkpoint triggers on the worktree. You see what each agent is doing without attaching to its terminal.

Quickstart

Native desktop app (recommended)

The desktop app gives you the full Torque workspace in a dedicated native window — no Toolbelt sidebar, no browser tab — and it is the easiest way to get started.

git clone git@github.com:runtorque/torque.git
cd torque
make deps
make deploy
make desktop-deps
make run

make deploy installs the primary standalone/desktop app files under ~/.torque/app and refreshes the CLI symlink. make run starts a native desktop window on its own profile and port (defaults: desktop profile, port 18933), so it does not collide with any Toolbelt instance you might also run.

Standalone browser mode

From the cloned repo, after make deploy has been run once:

make standalone
make open

Standalone mode launches the daemon and opens Torque in your default browser. It is useful when you want a wider workspace or are running on a remote / shared machine.

iTerm2 Toolbelt mode

For macOS users who live in iTerm2, Torque can also embed directly in the Toolbelt sidebar so it sits next to your terminal sessions.

make deps
make deploy-toolbelt
make cli

Then in iTerm2: