Changelog

Notable changes to Shelbi, newest first. This page is hand-maintained: each release gets one entry, written as prose with code samples where they help. Entries are reverse-chronological — prepend a new one at the top.

When you cut a release, add an entry directly below this paragraph using the template:

v0.1.0 — 2026-06-23

The first cut of Shelbi — an open-source agent orchestrator for the terminal, built on tmux. You talk to one orchestrator agent; it delegates work to worker agents running in tmux panes, locally or over SSH, and reports back. This release lands the full local-to-remote loop end to end.

Onboarding. A first run with no projects drops you into a two-phase, idempotent wizard — name your assistant, then walk each project through setup. It auto-fills from your environment (repo path, default branch, GitHub URL) and suggests a worker count from available RAM. Pick a naming style (phonetic, Greek, or Toy Story) and the workers are laid out machine by machine. A .shelbi/project marker at the repo root makes later runs auto-select the project; shelbi with no arguments otherwise launches the sole project's TUI, or a fuzzy picker when there's more than one.

The TUI. A two-pane ratatui dashboard: a sidebar with Chat/Tasks navigation, a live worker roster with state badges (working, awaiting input, awaiting permission, review-ready, idle), and a Ready for Review queue; beside it a content pane that swaps between the orchestrator chat, a five-column Kanban (Backlog → Todo → In Progress → Review → Done), a Machines view, and a Review list. Ctrl+P opens a Nucleo-backed fuzzy command palette as a tmux popup for jumping between projects, workers, and views.

Orchestration. Move a card to Todo and the orchestrator takes it from there — it watches the column and, as soon as a worker frees up, checks out the highest-priority unblocked card on a fresh branch in that worker's own worktree and starts the runner. depends_on blocks a task until its dependencies land in Done. Finished work lands in Review and the worker stops; activating a review checks the branch out, spawns a fresh agent pane to interrogate the diff, and lets you merge into the default branch — or push and open a PR with --pr.

Anywhere tmux runs. Workers run on the hub or on any machine reachable over SSH with tmux and an agent CLI installed. Shelbi drives panes with tmux send-keys + capture-pane, transparently prefixed with ssh host -- for remotes; a poller reads each pane's shelbi:<state> title marker into worker status, which is what lights up the sidebar badges. Agent runners (claude, codex, or any interactive CLI) are pluggable and declared per project.

State you can read. No daemons, no servers, no database — every project, task, log, and worker status is a markdown or YAML file under ~/.shelbi/. The same shelbi CLI the orchestrator drives (task, merge, reload, events, …) is the one you can run yourself.

Install from source with ./scripts/install.sh (builds --release, drops the binary at $HOME/bin/shelbi, ad-hoc re-signs on macOS).