Gaia

A local-first macOS dashboard for orchestrating Claude Code sessions across named agent personas.

Gaia turns a Claude Code subscription into a tiny in-house team you chat with, schedule, and supervise from one screen. Each agent is a folder on disk — a CLAUDE.md persona plus a stack of .claude/skills/ markdown files — and Gaia is the cockpit that runs them, watches them, and stitches their work into projects, playbooks, and recurring tasks. It runs entirely on your Mac. No accounts, no cloud, no per-token billing beyond the Claude Pro/Max subscription you already pay for.

Screenshots

See docs/screenshots/ for the full set.

• docs/screenshots/overview.png — Overview dashboard with workforce status and recent activity
• docs/screenshots/agents.png — Agents list with inline launch controls per persona
• docs/screenshots/projects.png — Projects board with milestones, kanban, and Plan-with-Claude wizard
• docs/screenshots/schedule.png — Cron schedule view
• docs/screenshots/playbooks.png — Playbook templates library
• docs/screenshots/tasks.png — Tasks view across the workforce

What you get

• 10 agent personas out of the box — Chief of Staff, Researcher, Engineer, Editor, Customer Success, Sales/BD, Designer, Data Analyst, Project Manager, Scriptwriter. Each ships with a starter CLAUDE.md persona and one default skill.
• 5 team bundles — Content, Engineering, Research, Sales/BD, Exec Support. Pick a bundle on first run and Gaia scaffolds the right agents together.
• 15 playbook templates spanning Productivity, Engineering, Research, Content, Sales, Customer Success, and Data.
• Projects with milestones, deadlines, a kanban board, recurring tasks, and a calendar view.
• Scheduled runs — cron jobs that fire skills automatically (daily inbox triage, weekly status digests, end-of-day journaling).
• Plan-with-Claude wizard — headlessly invokes Claude Code to turn a one-line goal into a structured project plan you can edit and apply.
• Thermal monitoring widget for Apple Silicon, powered by macmon.
• Native macOS integration — osascript-driven Terminal launches, native folder pickers, no Electron, no web wrapper.

Philosophy

Personas are folders. An agent is just agents/<slug>/CLAUDE.md plus a skills directory. Edit it in any text editor. Version it. Diff it. The dashboard is a view onto the filesystem, not a database of black-box bots.

Skills are markdown. A skill is a prompt with metadata. No DSL, no graph, no chains. If you can write a prompt, you can write a skill.

Local-first, always. Everything lives in app/data/gaia.db (a single SQLite file) and the agents/ directory. Copy two paths and you have a full backup. No sync service. No telemetry.

macOS-native. Terminal.app and iTerm2 are first-class. The folder picker is the system picker. The thermal widget reads the same sensors Activity Monitor reads.

Human-in-the-loop. Destructive actions queue for approval. You decide what runs, what gets written, and what gets sent.

Requirements

• macOS 14+ (Sequoia recommended)
• Node 20+ — node --version must print v20.x.x or newer
• Claude Code CLI — npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code, then claude login once. Requires Claude Pro or Max.
• ~500 MB free disk space (mostly node_modules)
• A free TCP port — Gaia uses 7878 by default
• Optional: macmon (brew install macmon && macmon serve --install) for the thermal monitoring widget on Apple Silicon

Install

The full guide lives in INSTALL.md. The three-line version:

gh repo clone pulsingjupiter/gaia
cd gaia && ./setup.sh
cd app && npm run dev    # → http://localhost:7878

setup.sh is idempotent. It checks your Node version, verifies the Claude CLI is installed, runs npm install, scaffolds any missing agent home directories, and creates the SQLite data directory.

What it ISN'T

Setting expectations up front saves everyone time:

• Not a framework for building agents from scratch. If you want to define agent graphs, tools, and message routing yourself, look at LangGraph, AutoGen, or CrewAI.
• Not an autonomous coding agent. Gaia spawns Claude Code sessions in Terminal windows you watch and approve. If you want a heads-down coding loop, look at OpenHands or Cursor.
• Not multi-user or cloud-hosted. One user, one machine. If you need shared state across a team, pick a hosted product.
• Not Windows or Linux. It uses osascript to drive Terminal.app and the native macOS folder picker. A non-trivial chunk of the code would need to be rewritten to port.

Tech stack

• Next.js 16 with Turbopack (App Router, Node runtime)
• React 19 + Tailwind CSS v4
• better-sqlite3 for the local store (single file, no daemon)
• node-cron for scheduled tasks
• chokidar for filesystem watching
• Claude Code CLI as the agent runtime
• macOS osascript for Terminal.app / iTerm2 integration

Status

Solo, MIT-licensed side project. No support contract, no SLA, no roadmap promises. Built because the maintainer wanted a calm cockpit for the agents already running on his laptop and didn't see one. If that resonates, contributions are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. If you want guarantees, fork it.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the quickstart, coding conventions, and scope statement.

Security

See SECURITY.md. The short version: Gaia has no authentication. Do not expose it to the public internet. It is intended for local-only personal use.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Do whatever you want with it.