cezar ⚡

Parallel coding agents orchestrator — a local cockpit for running and tracking AI coding-agent tasks in your repo.

Type a task, pick a workflow and an agent — Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode (experimental), or a mix of them per step — and watch it work live: steps, tool calls, tokens, diffs, in a browser cockpit that runs entirely on your machine. Your CLI logins, your gh, your files. No accounts, no database, no cloud.

🔥 Fire and forget. Queue a stack of autonomous coding and maintenance tasks and let them run — cezar orchestrates them across isolated worktrees, in parallel. Flip the Autonomous flag and a run never stops to ask; it just finishes. Leave it on a VPS and you get a dev team that's always on — a mobile-friendly cockpit you can check from your phone, working your backlog while you're away.

A look inside · What cezar does best · What it solves · Who it's for · Quick start · How it works · Core concepts · Cockpit tour · Agent backends · Remote access

cd your-repo
npx cezar-cli        # → cockpit at http://localhost:4321

That's the whole setup. If your claude CLI is logged in (Pro/Max) and gh is authenticated, there is nothing else to configure. State lives in .ai/cezar/ inside your repo — plain JSON, NDJSON and Markdown you can cat and fix by hand.

A look inside

Click any thumbnail for the full-size screenshot.

Orchestrate parallel agents	Watch a run live	Parallel variants
Run and queue many tasks at once — each in its own worktree — with live status, cost and peak memory per run.	Every step, tool call, token and screenshot — streamed as it happens.	Run a task ×2/×3 in isolated worktrees, compare the diffs, keep one.
Workflow builder	GitHub, one click away	Skills + fire-and-forget
Stitch skills and shell checks into a reusable YAML chain, no code.	Open issues and PRs via your gh — run the agent straight on an issue.	Pick a Markdown skill and flip Autonomous — the run never stops to ask, so you can walk away.

What cezar does best 🏆

Plenty of tools wrap a single coding agent in a nicer window — a "Codex GUI", a conductor-style app, one-agent front-ends. cezar's bet is different. Three things it does better than any of them:

• 🪶 Genuinely zero config. npx cezar-cli in your repo and you're running — no wizard, no API keys, no env vars, no schema, no database. It rides the claude / codex / opencode logins and the gh you already have, and every missing piece degrades gracefully instead of blocking you.
• 🖥️ Built for a server (VPS mode). cezar is made to live on a VPS, cloud, or dedicated box as an always-on janitor for your repo — headless-first, with a mobile-friendly cockpit you drive from anywhere. It's a coding server you can actually watch, not a desktop app bolted onto one machine.
• 🔀 Parallel + autonomous orchestration. The real edge: cezar runs many agents at once in isolated worktrees, queues the overflow, and pushes each one autonomously through skill playbooks — fire-and-forget. This is exactly what single-agent GUIs don't do well: they babysit one agent, while cezar orchestrates a whole team and drains your backlog while you're away.

What it solves

Most "AI coding agent" tooling makes you choose between a terminal you can't see into once it's running, and a cloud product that wants your API key, your code on their servers, and an account. cezar is the third option: the agents run locally under your subscription, a cockpit shows you exactly what they're doing, and an orchestrator keeps a whole queue of them moving.

• 👀 No visibility into a running agent. A headless claude run is a black box until it finishes. cezar streams every step — agent text, each tool call and its result, tokens and cost per step — live, and keeps the full replay.
• 🧩 One agent, one working tree, one thing at a time. Kick off a second task and it fights the first over your files. cezar runs each task in its own git worktree, so two (or three) agents work in parallel without stepping on each other — or on the branch you're editing.
• 🗂️ A backlog that needs babysitting. Queue a stack of tasks and cezar orchestrates them: it runs up to your parallel limit and holds the rest in an ordered queue. Point it at a GitHub issue and it runs straight on that, so working the tracker down stops being a manual chore. Turn on the opt-in Inbox (CEZ_FOLLOWUPS=1) and an agent's leftover follow-ups become the next tasks too — one click each.
• 🤖 "Autonomous" means you still have to sit there. Flip the Autonomous flag and a run never parks to ask — it keeps going until the task is done. Pair it with a skill (a Markdown playbook) and you've got fire-and-forget automation: hand off "fix this", "upgrade that", "triage these" and walk away.
• ✅ The agent finishes and you have to trust it. cezar ends non-trivial runs at a review gate: inspect the diff, send notes back into the same session, or push a draft PR — never an auto-merge.
• ♻️ Losing a session when it fails. Every run records its claude session id. Take it over interactively in one click (claude --resume <id>), or continue it in-process from the cockpit.
• 🔀 Locked into one agent vendor. Most tools wed you to a single CLI. cezar drives Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode (experimental) through one runner seam — set a default, pick a backend per task, or mix them inside one workflow (implement with one agent, review with another) — and through OpenCode you can point a run at open-source or local models, not just the big vendors. See Agent backends.
• 🖥️ Close the laptop and the work stops. A local agent only runs while your machine is on and awake. Put cezar on a VPS, cloud box, or dedicated server and the cockpit becomes the GUI for an always-on AI coding team — kick off, watch and steer tasks from your laptop or phone, on the train or between meetings, while the agents keep grinding through the backlog back on the server.
• ⚡ Setup tax. No wizard, no env vars, no schema. Skills are Markdown, workflows are short YAML, and everything degrades: no gh → works without PRs, no network → local skills still load, no .ai/skills → the bare prompt still runs.

Who it's for

• Solo devs and small teams who want the leverage of coding agents without handing their code and keys to a SaaS — the agent runs on your subscription, on your machine.
• claude CLI power users who love headless runs but want to see them, compare a few attempts side by side, and review a diff before it lands.
• Anyone with a backlog who'd rather queue three tasks into isolated worktrees and pick the winners than babysit one terminal.
• Teams with shared conventions who want their playbooks (skills) pulled from a git repo, applied consistently, with zero per-project setup.

Quick start

Prerequisites: Node 20+, at least one logged-in agent CLI — the claude CLI (Pro/Max subscription), the codex CLI, or OpenCode — and, optionally, git and the gh CLI.

cd your-repo
npx cezar-cli              # start the cockpit for the current repo
#   or: npx @open-mercato/cezar

The cockpit opens at http://localhost:4321 (auto-picks the next free port if busy). Type a task, pick a workflow, hit Start. That's it.

npx cezar-cli run "add a --json flag to the export command"   # headless, CI-friendly
npx cezar-cli init                                            # scaffold .ai/cezar/

Both the cezar and cez commands are installed, so once it's on your PATH you can run either. No API key is ever used — cezar shells out to whichever agent CLIs you are already logged into, claude by default.

Contributing? Local development shows how to get a global cezar command straight off your checkout (npm run install-as-command) — no publish needed.

Just kicking the tires? Set CEZ_DRY_RUN=1 to run against a bundled mock instead of the real CLI — the whole