Orca

Operator's take

Running several coding agents at once turns out to be the easy half. The hard half is what comes back: five branches of results, five terminals to watch, and no single place to see what finished, read the diff, and merge the winner. Orca calls itself an ADE — an agentic development environment — and the name is the positioning: not a terminal with agent niceties and not a phone remote, but the whole loop in one app.

The loop, concretely: fan one prompt across five agents, each in its own isolated git worktree, then compare the results and merge the winner. Review is a first-class surface — drop comments on any diff line and ship them back to the agent, edit and commit without leaving the app. Around that sit the parts a loop actually needs: GitHub and Linear boards in-app so a worktree can open straight from a task; an embedded Chromium browser whose Design Mode sends any clicked UI element's HTML, CSS, and a cropped screenshot into the agent's prompt; Ghostty-class terminal splits and a VS Code-based editor; and reach — macOS, Windows, and Linux desktops, SSH worktrees onto a bigger box, a headless orca serve mode for a VPS, and a mobile companion for monitoring and follow-ups. It runs any CLI agent (about twenty with first-class treatment, plus "any CLI agent" as the rule) on your own subscriptions. MIT-licensed and free.

The catch is the size of the bet. An environment that wants to be your editor, terminal, browser, and review surface is asking you to move your whole workflow into one young app — the exact trade the terminal-first tools in this lane exist to avoid, and reasonable people split on it. The project ships daily and its star count roughly doubled between late July and early September 2026, which is momentum and also churn. If you want your existing editor and terminal left alone, Orca is more app than you asked for; if you want the fan-out-and-merge loop to live somewhere purpose-built, it's the most complete answer in the lane.

What it's good at

• One prompt, five worktrees — fan a task across parallel agents in isolated git worktrees, compare results, merge the winner.
• Review built in — comment on any diff line and send it back to the agent; review, edit, and commit without context-switching.
• Tasks in, worktrees out — GitHub PRs, issues, and project boards plus Linear, browsable in-app, with worktrees opening from a task.
• Embedded browser with Design Mode — a real Chromium window where clicking any UI element sends its HTML, CSS, and a cropped screenshot into the agent's prompt.
• Real terminals and a real editor — Ghostty-class terminal splits with scrollback that survives restarts, plus a VS Code-based editor with autosave.
• Runs anywhere you do — macOS/Windows/Linux desktops, an iOS/Android companion app, SSH worktrees with auto-reconnect, and a headless orca serve mode for VPS deployment.
• Agent-agnostic on your subscriptions — Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode, Pi and roughly twenty first-class CLI agents, plus any CLI agent; you bring the plans you already pay for.

What it's not

• The whole-hog bet — editor, terminal, browser, and review in one app; operators who want their existing stack untouched will find it heavier than the problem.
• Young and shipping fast — daily releases and rapid growth mean the surface moves under you.
• Mobile companion is early — iOS via App Store and TestFlight; Android ships as a directly-downloaded versioned APK (0.0.32 at capture).
• VPS value costs setup — the run-anywhere story beyond the desktop runs through headless orca serve and SSH worktrees, which is real setup work, not a checkbox.