If your CTO didn't spend the past year making an orchestration tool and a baby is he even qualified?
I have a vibe-coded orchestrator that I use to manage my claude and codex sessions across multiple machines, can also spin up sprites from fly.
https://github.com/tinkerer/propanes
warning: it is probably totally unsuitable for anyone else to use except for me
The main idea is a widget that you embed in your apps that lets you select elements, paste screenshots, and prompt what to change. This workflow is very productive for me. I would encourage everyone to add element selection to their orchestrators prompt composers. If you watch the looms on the readme note that my CLAUDE.MD calls me a Meat Computer and reminds me to hydrate.
I have a native tauri version that lets you select UI elements through the macos accessibility api too.
The session service uses tmux so you can open a native terminal via ssh and tmux attach. I add a ton of features that are in varying degrees of half-baked: the "brainstorm" mode allows you to do microphone transcription while interacting with the DOM and it will suggest tickets automatically. I've also been working on "bd2sdd" which is supposed to take your strings of user inputs and transform it into a spec, presumably because I also desired regressions. There are Wiggums (which aren't relevant anymore with /goal) and "FAFO swarms" (fan-out, aggregate, filter, optimze) which I use to reverse engineer other pieces of software, PowWow for codex and claude to work together.
I stole the structured views and remote session control from my friend's Agent Portal project txcl.io which is more fully-baked and narrower scope than propanes.
The ticketing system / tmux / structured views has been slowly evolving into multi-agent chat with a primary "Chief of Staff." It integrated pretty nicely into Slack.
I’ve been working on an [OSS TUI](https://github.com/prettysmartdev/awman) for managing agent execution and workflows in containers (local or remotely) and would love to collaborate if you’re interested.
Also, do you see Boxes supporting OpenCode and self-hosted/local models in the future? If the rented machines have enough RAM and GPU access, it seems like there could be an interesting path toward a model-agnostic platform rather than being tied to the frontier labs.
I imagine other players will build cloud support in their own apps, but even now there's a lot of distraction for them. Everyone is trying to still support local execution, which looks really different from cloud. A lot of the labs are taking their coding-focused teams and throwing non-coding on their plates as well (the same app for non-engineers slinging google sheets).
We think getting the cloud experience right for software engineers (as well as companies, with their own hosting/development needs) is going to be really hard, and the problem needs a team fully focused on that. We also think that companies are rightly nervous about putting all their eggs in one basket -- their long term development environment should be harness and model agnostic.
RE OpenCode + self-hosted/local models: definitely. There's nothing holding us back from supporting these since we're just linux machines. But we wanted to start with the most popular harnesses first and go from there.
Or, open source it and let us run it on our own VPS and keep your expensive cloud for those who want to pay. As it stands would never consider it.
You could use VPS, but spinning up and down boxes on inactivity takes a long time, and making changes to the template for new machines is less trivial there. If you're only paying for 1 VPS box, then you lose the "multiple independent machines" benefit, and I imagine things start to get more expensive even in the VPS world when you have 10 of them running at the same time (one per thread).
Then again, I'm just the guy running his mouth, and you guys are the ones actually doing the work :)
BTW, looks very polished and thought-through, I may have to still give it a try!
Re: web searches -- we're running a full linux kernel and the agent runs on the machine itself, so we can't sleep mid run. But conceptually, moving the agent off-box and sleeping during web searches etc would be interesting, but in our experience coding agents are running enough stuff on the machine itself (rg, bash, playwright, etc) that there wouldn't be much savings.
Why would I want this and not the other way around?
E.g code debugging
With boxes.dev I've starting pushing agents harder to run the full app and test their work end to end, and send me screenshots as proof. This takes time, sometimes up to 30-40 minutes, but is much more likely to be bug free at the end of the day.
We recommend you auth with only development credentials (or use something like 2 factor confirmation if you have more sensitive things you want to confirm before the agent accesses), but it's still early for us and we're continuing to refine this as we go. For companies, we're down to brainstorm how they'd like this to ideally work for them. And over the long term we'll support hosting this in your own cloud.
Curious if you have a take on how you'd like this to work from a UX standpoint.