Stop babysitting agents.

Tired of managing agents in terminal tabs? Struggling to keep track of which one needs attention and which one's stalled? Try Shelbi, an open source, personal agent orchestrator built on tmux.

open source Β· made with tmux Β· multi-machine

jlong@hub β€” my-project
❯ Good. Let's design the analytics dashboard we sketched last week. Sure. Starting from the mock: a metrics overview across the top, charts beneath, and a date-range filter driving the whole page. What's the headline metric? ❯ Signups, active users, and revenue β€” as big number tiles with week-over-week deltas. Got it. I'll have the tiles read from one /api/metrics endpoint so a single request backs the whole header row. ❯ And the charts underneath? A line chart for the trend and a bar chart for the plan breakdown. Both share the date range, so changing it re-queries once and both redraw. ❯ Add a way to pull the raw numbers out too β€” finance keeps asking. A CSV export scoped to the current filter, then. I'll also handle the empty and loading states so it never paints blank on first load. ❯ Perfect. Write it up so we don't lose the thread. On it. I'll draft dashboard.md β€” metrics API, charts, date-range filter, CSV export, empty/loading states, and tests. ⏺ Write(dashboard.md) ⎿ 48 lines written Done. dashboard.md covers all six. Want me to break it into tasks? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ❯ β–Š ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Model: Opus 4.8 Β· Ctx 4% Β· Cost $0.36 Β· Session 3m π– ° hub ⏡⏡ auto mode on (shift+tab to cycle)

Meet Shelbi

This is Inbox Zero for agent work.

Have an idea? Spot a bug? Simply talk to the Shelbi orchestrator agent the moment it occurs to you. The orchestrator doesn't do the work itself so it won't get derailed. Each item is written up in a standard format. Nothing small or big gets dropped. Let the agent write it up for you!

Tasks keep work focused.

Every item becomes a scoped task before a worker agent touches it. Agents do their best work in focused chunks. The orchestrator breaks big features down into smaller tasks. Small changes flow through quickly.

jlong@hub β€” my-project
Tasks Β· my-project 26 total Workflow: All β–Ύ Workspace: All β–Ύ B TO DO (6) IN PROGRESS (4) REVIEW (1) DONE (3) A Cache user sessions Paginate search API Fix mobile nav Add API ratelimit C app app βŽ‡ shelbi/pagina… app βŽ‡ shelbi/fix-mo… app K L Wire webhook retries Trim vendor bundle Dedupe error reports O app app βŽ‡ shelbi/trim-v… app G (12) Split OTel spans Backfill order index Prune stale flags app app βŽ‡ shelbi/backfi… app Sync i18n strings Migrate CI to arm64 app app βŽ‡ shelbi/migrat… Add health probes app Debounce autosave app
h/l col j/k row ⏎ open n new f filter r refresh

Agents provide specialization.

Workers build the code. Reviewers scrutinize it: QA, Security, and Adversarial Review ship in the box, each doing one job well. Tailor any of them with custom instructions and skills, or author your own.

jlong@hub β€” nvim instructions.md
  1 # Adversarial Review
  2 
  3 You are an adversarial code reviewer. A developer
  4 agent has finished a task and believes its branch is
  5 ready. Your job is not to confirm that belief β€” it is
  6 to try to prove the change is wrong before a human
  7 spends attention on it. Assume there is a bug until
  8 you have looked hard enough to say otherwise.
  9 
 10 ## What to review
 11 
 12 Review the diff on the current task's branch against
 13 the base branch β€” only what this task changed, plus
 14 the code that change touches. You are looking for
 15 defects the developer and the tests missed, not for
 16 style nits the preamble's checks already cover.
 17 
 18 ## How to review
 19 
 20 Work through every changed hunk and actively try to
 21 falsify it:
 22 
 23 - Correctness β€” Does it do what the task asked? Trace
 24   the non-obvious paths by hand. Off-by-one, wrong
 25   operator, inverted condition, a branch that silently
 26   does nothing.
 27 - Security β€” Untrusted input reaching a query, a
 28   shell, a path, or a template. Missing authz checks.
 29   Secrets in logs or errors. Unsafe defaults.
 30 - Error handling β€” What happens when the call fails,
 31   the input is empty, the list is huge, the value is
 32   null, two requests race?
 33 - Edge cases β€” Boundaries, empty and maximal inputs,
 34   concurrency, encoding, time zones β€” whatever this
 35   code plausibly meets in production.
 36 - Test coverage β€” Do the tests actually exercise the
 37   new behavior, or do they assert around it? Find a
 38   real input the change gets wrong that no test would
 39   catch, and treat that as a finding.
 40 
 41 ## How to report
 42 
 43 Write your findings as a structured review on the
 44 branch β€” a markdown ## Adversarial Review section, per
 45 this project's convention. For each finding:
 46 
 47 - Severity β€” blocker, major, or minor.
 48 - Location β€” path/to/file.rs:120 (or a range).
 49 - The problem β€” what breaks, and the concrete input or
 50   sequence that triggers it. A finding with a repro
 51   beats a vague worry.
 52 - Suggested fix β€” one line, when the fix is obvious.
 53 
 54 Order findings by severity, blockers first.
 55 
 56 ## Signing off or bouncing
 57 
 58 Every review ends one of two ways. Decide from the
 59 highest-severity finding. If nothing rises to a
 60 blocker, sign off and hand off forward. If any finding
 61 is a blocker, write up the findings and bounce the
 62 task back to the developer.
instructions.md1,1Β Β Β Β All
"instructions.md" 62L, 2231B

Workflows provide boundaries.

Every task moves through stages you define before it reaches you. Boundaries are what make autonomy safe. When your gates catch what you would, flip shelbi zen on and the orchestrator merges green work itself, then reports what landed and what needs you.

jlong@hub β€” nvim feature.yaml
  1 name: feature
  2 description: >
  3   A full app feature, from idea to merged. A
  4   developer builds it on a branch off main; then
  5   adversarial review, QA, and security each gate
  6   it before a human signs off and it merges.
  7 
  8 initial_status: backlog
  9 
 10 statuses:
 11   - { id: backlog,      owner: user }
 12   - { id: in-progress,  owner: agent, agent: developer }
 13   - { id: agent-review, owner: agent, agent: adversarial }
 14   - { id: qa,           owner: agent, agent: qa }
 15   - { id: security,     owner: agent, agent: security }
 16   - { id: review,       owner: user }
 17   - { id: done,         owner: user }
 18 
 19 transitions:
 20   - { from: backlog,      to: in-progress }
 21   - { from: in-progress,  to: agent-review, actions: [push_branch, open_pr] }
 22   - { from: agent-review, to: qa }
 23   - { from: qa,           to: security }
 24   - { from: security,     to: review }
 25   - { from: review,       to: done, actions: [merge, delete_branch] }
 26 
 27 git:
 28   base_branch: main
 29   merge_strategy: squash
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feature.yaml1,1Β Β Β Β All
"feature.yaml" 29L, 961B

Features

Kanban TUI
Every task is a card on a board in your terminal, so status is on screen instead of in your head.
Workers on any machine
Any box you can SSH into can take tasks. If it runs tmux and an agent CLI, it's a worker.
Made with tmux
Every worker runs in a real tmux pane. Attach to a session to watch an agent work or type to it directly.
Review flow
Finished tasks land in the review column and wait for you. Assign a review agent to any column to hold every task to the same bar.
Plain-file state
Tasks are markdown and workflows are YAML, stored in your repo. No database, no cloud, just files you can read, grep, and commit.
Open source
The whole system is MIT licensed on GitHub. You can read every line that runs on your machines.

Get started

brew install jlong/shelbi/shelbi && shelbi
Build from source