BossConsole

🔬 The operator's console for AI agents — and the scientists who direct them

The first open-source, multi-platform harness for AI agents — an evolvable toolbox for agents and the humans they work with.

🧪 Built for enterprises, science, and research.

⚡ Natively multi-threaded — built on the JVM, not Electron — with live hot-reload and laptop-to-supercomputer scale.

Bring your own agent — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or OpenCode — and give it a real browser, terminal, editor, secrets, and automation. Then decide exactly what each one is allowed to touch. Run it on your own machine, hand a live terminal to your phone with a QR code, and reshape any tool — by hand or by the agent itself — while the app keeps running.

⬇ Download · 📊 Compare · 🤖 Run an agent · 🔐 Governance · 🧰 Toolbox · 🖥️ BossTerm

Just want to download BOSS? Head to BossConsole-Releases for pre-built installers.

Built with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, BOSS unifies an embedded browser, a blazing-fast shareable terminal, a code editor, an extensible Toolbox of plugins, and a governed MCP tool layer into one desktop workspace for complex, AI-assisted work.

How BOSS compares

Every other AI-agent desktop app and agentic IDE — Claude Desktop, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity, Cursor, and Windsurf/Devin — is closed source, and most lock you to a single vendor's model. BOSS is the first open-source, multi-platform harness in the category: Apache-2.0, cross-platform, and built to run any agent.

The deeper difference: BOSS is both the agent's home and an agent-operable app. The same MCP layer your agent uses to do work also exposes BOSS itself — its tabs, terminals, browser, editor, git, secrets, and automation — as 100+ mcp__boss__* tools. Read-only tools (list tabs, read a pane's output, tail the console, snapshot performance, inspect git) give an agent live situational awareness of the workspace; action tools let it act on what it finds. So the agent doesn't just chat about your code — it perceives the running app and drives it, carrying out multi-step tasks autonomously.

And unlike most of the field, BOSS bundles a real embedded browser — Fluck — the agent can navigate, script, and automate (browser_navigate, browser_run_js, plus record-and-replay RPA), with logins filled from the Secret Manager and never handed to the model.

It's also native, not Electron. BOSS runs on the JVM with true multithreading and hot-reloads plugins at runtime — so an agent can evolve a tool and see it live, without restarting the app — while Claude Desktop and the VS Code-fork IDEs (Antigravity, Cursor, Windsurf/Devin) run on a single-threaded JavaScript event loop.

✅ yes · △ partial/limited · ❌ no.  ¹ Only OpenAI's Codex CLI is open source (Apache-2.0); the Codex desktop app is proprietary.  ² Claude Desktop's "Computer Use" controls the whole screen rather than bundling a scriptable in-app browser.  ³ Enterprise-plan admin controls exist, but fine-grained per-tool RBAC isn't documented.  ⁴ Codex CLI is cross-platform; the desktop app is macOS/Windows.  ⁵ VS Code-fork IDEs reload extensions via a full window reload; none offers BOSS-style live plugin hot-reload + agent-driven tool evolution.  ⁶ Claude Desktop and the VS Code-fork IDEs run on Electron (Chromium + Node.js) — a single-threaded JavaScript event loop with worker/child-process offloading; BOSS runs natively on the JVM with true multithreading.  Compiled from public sources, July 2026 — these products move fast, so corrections are welcome via issue or PR.

Contents

• How BOSS compares
• Downloads
• Why BOSS
• Run any AI coding agent
• You decide what your agents can touch
• MCP — give agents real tools
• Toolbox — an app store inside the app
• BossTerm — a terminal you can share to any device
• Case study: the DNA Origami Inventor
• Design System
• Development
• CLI · CI/CD · Documentation · Open source & ecosystem

Downloads

Download links always fetch the newest release directly (via the latest-release edge function; the saved file keeps its versioned name). Release metadata as JSON — version, assets, sha256 checksums — is at ?app=boss. To browse all versions, see BossConsole-Releases.

Quick Install

# macOS (Homebrew — Recommended)
brew install --cask boss

# macOS/Linux (Universal Script)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/risa-labs-inc/BossConsole-Releases/main/install.sh | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/risa-labs-inc/BossConsole-Releases/main/install.ps1 | iex

Why BOSS

• 🤖 Bring your own agent — run Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or OpenCode in a BOSS terminal and give them a real toolset (browser, files, git, shell, secrets, automation) over MCP.
• 🧰 Extensible by design — a built-in Toolbox plugin store; the terminal, editor, and browser are themselves hot-loadable plugins, and you can scaffold your own with an AI agent.
• 🔐 You stay in control — server-enforced role-based access control, a per-user kill-switch for every agent tool, and user-scoped secrets. You decide exactly what an agent can call.
• 🖥️ A terminal built to share — hand a live terminal session to your phone via QR, or to a teammate over an end-to-end-encrypted link, with view-only or full control.
• ⚡ Fast and native — Compose Multiplatform desktop app with the built-in Fluck browser, on macOS, Windows, and Linux (x64 + ARM64).
• ⚙️ Multi-threaded, built to scale — truly multi-threaded on the JVM (not a single-threaded Electron/JS event loop), with an out-of-process microkernel architecture engineered to run from a laptop to a supercomputer.

Run any AI coding agent

BOSS is agent-agnostic. Open a terminal, launch your preferred CLI, and — once attached — it gains the boss toolset automatically.