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agents-in-a-box

What is agents-in-a-box?

A terminal-native ecosystem for managing AI coding agents. Three components share one monorepo, plus a supporting knowledge library:

#ComponentWhat it is
1ainb TUI + CLIRust terminal app for spawning and supervising AI coding sessions. Each session gets its own git worktree and tmux session. Multi-provider: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Kiro, raw shell, SSH.
2ToolkitPortable skills + agents + workflows that deploy to 11 different AI coding tools from a single source. 86 skills, 37 agents.
3Plugins (v2 ABI)Native-binary plugins for the TUI host. Capability-gated, JSON-RPC over stdio. Own screens, CLIs, statusline segments. Two reference plugins ship in-tree (burndown, session-reader).
4reflect-kbKnowledge capture and retrieval library. Two-tier: QMD for fast vector search + nano-graphrag for cross-project entity-relation queries. Installed as the reflect CLI.

The whole thing is open source (MIT) and runs locally. No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.

Who it’s for

Solo developers and small teams who:

  • Already live in tmux and a terminal multiplexer
  • Run multiple AI coding sessions in parallel and want them isolated
  • Prefer keyboard-driven tools to web dashboards
  • Want a single learning system that captures insights across every coding session

If you’ve ever had two Claude Code sessions stomp on each other’s branches, lost context across compaction, or wanted to wire up swarm-style agent coordination from the terminal — this is built for that.

What it’s not

  • Not a hosted SaaS. No accounts, no servers, no signup.
  • Not a Claude Code replacement. It orchestrates Claude Code (and other tools); it doesn’t reimplement them.
  • Not Windows-native. Use WSL2.
  • Not an IDE plugin. It’s a terminal application.

How the four components compose

   ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │                       ainb TUI host                          │
   │                                                              │
   │   Rust · ratatui · tokio · 115 modules · Unix-only           │
   │                                                              │
   │   tmux ←─ session persistence                                │
   │   git  ←─ worktree-per-session isolation                     │
   │   ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────┐         │
   │   │  Plugin runtime (v2 ABI)                       │         │
   │   │   ↔ burndown / session-reader / your plugin    │         │
   │   └────────────────────────────────────────────────┘         │
   └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
        │                              │
        ▼                              ▼
   ┌──────────────────────┐    ┌────────────────────────────────┐
   │  Claude · Codex      │    │  Toolkit (deployed via         │
   │  Gemini · Copilot    │    │  toolkit/bootstrap.js to:      │
   │  Kiro · shell · SSH  │    │  ~/.claude, ~/.codex,          │
   └──────────────────────┘    │  ~/.copilot, ~/.gemini, …)     │
                               └────────────────────────────────┘


   ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
   │  reflect-kb · GraphRAG + QMD · captured learnings across all │
   │  the above, queryable via /reflect, /recall, /ingest         │
   └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Each component is independently useful. You can use the toolkit without ever opening the TUI; you can use the TUI without ever writing a plugin; you can use reflect-kb standalone.

See also