Spicy Human / Tools / Humans

Humans

One desktop workspace for terminals, the agents that run in them, and the notes around them. A fork of an open-source terminal, renamed, and given a memory.

The window: a rail, a centre pane of shells and agents, an inspector, and two surfaces that read markdown from disk A window wireframe with a narrow rail on the left, a centre pane holding tabs for shells and agent sessions with a prompt composer at its foot, and an inspector on the right. Below the window, a folder of markdown files feeds two surfaces: the Vault, which draws notes as a graph, and the Brain, which draws a shared journal as capsules with sessions clustered around them. Humans shellshellagent · GUIagent · CLInotes tools the agent called, as they happen prompt composer · slash chips inspector a rail of views a folder of markdown on disk Vault notes, links, a graph Brain a shared journal, as a map
Terminal first. The two surfaces beside it read plain files from disk and never write anywhere else.

What it does

Humans is a terminal first. Tabs of shells sit in the centre pane, and the coding agents you run in them get a proper face: a prompt composer, a feed of the tools they call as they call them, and a toggle back to the raw command line whenever you want it.

Around the terminal are two surfaces that read plain markdown from disk. The Vault is a notes app in the Obsidian manner: folders, links between notes, a graph of them. The Brain reads a shared journal that several AI models write to while they work, and draws it as a volume: each project a capsule, with the sessions that touched it clustered around it, so the shape you see is the real topology of the work. Search, sort, pin and fade reach real scripts, not mock buttons.

How it's built

The shell
Tauri, with a Rust core, shipped as a release installer that bundles the interface. An Electron shell exists too and spawns the same Rust binary as a loopback sidecar, so both shells share one dispatch surface: a new command is written once.
The front
React with a single store and no router. What looks like navigation is a sidebar rail mode, centre-pane document tabs and a right-hand inspector.
Access
Allowlisted, never arbitrary. The Brain names an action or a query; Rust decides which executable, which script and which arguments. Nothing on the interface side can run a command it invents.
Marks
Pins and fades are kept per machine, outside the synced files, so one machine's pin never fights another's copy through version control.
Colour
Reserved for agent state. Everything else has to argue for its colour, and mostly loses: the vault graph gets folder colour only inside its own tab, and the Brain gets memory-state colour on the same terms.
The field
A halftone of process inks drawn from a fixed seed, so it never reshuffles on repaint: a watermark behind the title bar and full strength on an empty stage. This page borrows the same field.

Where it stands

In daily use on one machine, as the place the agents get driven from. The Vault and the Brain read local files only; nothing leaves the machine. The folder and the binary still carry the fork's old name while the rename settles.

Not distributed. Built on an open-source terminal, and the fork's changes stay with its maker for now.