Munder Difflin

Local multi-agent harness for Claude Code. Autonomous agents that message, route, and remember — coordinated by a GOD orchestrator you talk to, and visualized as avatars at work on a shared office floor.

[!NOTE] The world's best agents. The world's worst paper company. Munder Difflin takes the claude CLI sessions you already run in your terminal and turns them into a self-coordinating team: each agent gets long-term memory, a mailbox, and a desk on a 2D office floor — and a GOD orchestrator agent routes work between them while you watch.

What it is

Munder Difflin is a desktop app that wraps real Claude Code terminals as fully-capable agents, wires them into a hive mind, and puts a GOD orchestration agent in charge — the one agent you talk to in order to get things done. Under the hood it runs the fastest memory layer in the world so every agent remembers what it learns and recalls it instantly.

• Every terminal is an agent. Each claude session runs as a real process in a pseudo-terminal (node-pty), byte-for-byte authentic, rendered with xterm.js.
• Every agent is an avatar. Sessions appear as characters on a Pixi.js office floor — they walk to stations as they work, and envelopes fly desk-to-desk when they message each other.
• The hive coordinates them. Agents read their memory and drain a mailbox; the router moves messages between inboxes; the GOD agent adjudicates, assigns, and escalates only when it needs you.
• Memory that's instant. A markdown-first memory layer with a semantic recall index means agents remember across sessions and recall in milliseconds.

How it works

            you ── talk to ──►  ┌─────────────┐
                                │  GOD agent  │  orchestrator / supervisor
                                │ (Michael's  │  roster · routing · adjudication
                                │   office)   │  blackboard · task ledger
                                └──────┬──────┘
                                       │ assigns · routes · escalates
              ┌────────────────────────┼────────────────────────┐
              ▼                         ▼                         ▼
        ┌───────────┐            ┌───────────┐            ┌───────────┐
        │  agent A  │  message   │  agent B  │  message   │  agent C  │
        │  claude   │ ─────────► │  claude   │ ─────────► │  claude   │
        │  + memory │            │  + memory │            │  + memory │
        └───────────┘            └───────────┘            └───────────┘
              └──────── shared hive: memory · mailbox · blackboard · log ───────┘

1. You spawn agents — each is a normal claude process with its own working directory, identity, and hook lifecycle.
2. Agents collaborate through the hive — a local git repo of plain files. They write to their own outbox/; the harness's router delivers into recipients' inbox/. No agent ever touches git (single-committer design avoids index.lock corruption).
3. The GOD agent runs the floor — it reads every request, resolves routine ones itself (keeping the system fully autonomous), and only escalates critical items (spend, destructive ops, scope changes) into an approvals queue you act on.
4. Everything is visible — you watch avatars move, envelopes fly, and the live terminal stream; you can type back into any session, browse its files, and read its git history.

See HIVE.md for the full multi-agent design, SPEC.md for the terminal/event plane, and DESIGN.md for the visual system.

Features

| Area | What works today | |---|---| | Real terminals | Spawn any command (default: claude) in a node-pty PTY. Full read/write/resize/kill, live streaming over IPC, multi-agent. | | The hive | On-disk multi-agent layer: per-agent identity + long-term memory, atomic-file mailboxes, a shared blackboard, append-only event log, single-committer git. | | GOD orchestrator | An always-on supervisor agent that adjudicates traffic, routes tasks, scribes the blackboard, and escalates only critical items to you. | | Memory layer | Markdown-first long-term memory per agent, mined into a shared semantic palace for instant recall; searchable from the UI. Degrades gracefully when the index isn't installed. | | Office floor | Pixi.js scene with a Tiled office map, camera, recolored cast, pathfinding, seat assignment, and tool-bubble overlays. | | Message handoffs | When the hive routes a message, an envelope flies from sender to recipient (tinted by speech-act; escalations fly to the door) and pops an arrival sparkle. | | Per-agent panel | Live terminal, command bar to type back, fullscreen terminal, sandboxed file browser + CodeMirror editor, and a git tab (status, log, commit graph, branches). | | Approvals & memory panels | Human-in-the-loop approval queue for escalations; a memory search panel over the shared palace. | | Onboarding wizard | First-run setup: harness home, registered repos, default command, auto-mode. | | Design system | Fully tokenized SNES / Animal-Crossing aesthetic — pixel panels, buttons, badges, hand-drawn icons. See DESIGN.md. | | Command Center | Michael's control surface: Terminal, Floor (roster + dispatch + per-agent model selector), Memory (MemPalace + text search + memory graph), Activity (log + board + real token telemetry + CI watcher), Tasks (kanban board with dependencies + status tracking), Schedules (recurring missions). | | Per-agent git worktrees | 'Git isolation' toggle in Add Agent auto-provisions a dedicated worktree per agent on spawn and tears it down on kill — agents never collide on branches. | | Token & cost telemetry | Activity tab reads ~/.claude/projects/ JSONL transcripts and surfaces real token counts + estimated USD cost per agent per session. | | Task kanban | Dependency-aware kanban board in the Command Center Tasks tab — assign tasks to agents, track status across todo/doing/blocked/done, wire dependencies so work starts in order. | | Scheduled missions | Recurring auto-dispatch missions with label, interval, target agent, and body — the harness fires them on a timer so the floor keeps running without a human prompt. | | GitHub ingestion | Pull open issues from any registered repo via the gh CLI and assign them to agents with one click from the Command Center. | | CI status watcher | Live pass/fail/in-progress status for GitHub Actions runs, visible in the Activity tab for every registered repo. | | Threaded chat | Every hive message is grouped by conversation and rendered as a reply chain in each agent's Messages tab — readable, replyable, auditable. | | Desktop notifications | Native OS notifications when an agent finishes a task or is waiting for your input. | | Agent archival | Closing an agent tab archives it (memory + history preserved) rather than destroying it. |

[!NOTE] Status: v0.1.7 — full-featured local harness. The hook plane, office floor, hive coordination, git isolation, token telemetry, task kanban, scheduled missions, GitHub/CI integration, threaded conversations, desktop notifications, agent archival, a Slack→queue bridge, and native human-in-the-loop approvals are all functional and shipping. macOS (signed), Windows, and Linux builds are available on the releases page.

Getting started

Prerequisites

• macOS (macOS-first; Windows/Linux untested).
• Node.js 18+ and npm.
• A C/C++ toolchain for node-pty's native addon — on macOS, install Xcode Command Line Tools:

  xcode-select --install
  

• Claude Code on your PATH so agents can run claude (the default command). Any other command works too.
• Optional: the semantic memory index for instant cross-session recall (the app works without it — markdown memory still functions).

Install & run

git clone https://github.com/chaitanyagiri/munder-difflin.git
cd munder-difflin
npm install        # postinstall rebuilds node-pty against Electron's ABI
npm run dev        # launches the Electron app with hot reload

On first launch you'll go through the onboarding wizard, then land on the floor. Use Add agent to spawn your first session — the GOD agent seats itself in Michael's office automatically.

Other scripts

npm run buil