Tessera: A Comprehensive Workspace for AI Coding Sessions and Agent Orchestration

Introduction

Tessera is a powerful workspace designed to streamline AI coding sessions, acting as a local control room for agents like Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. It provides a unified environment for organizing AI development across projects, collections, tabs, panes, and Git worktrees. With Tessera, developers can run more agents and lose less context, transforming complex agent interactions into a visible and manageable workflow.

Why Use and Benefits

Tessera turns a pile of terminals into an organized workflow, offering a comprehensive solution for the entire agent loop.

• Delegate in Parallel: Run independent tasks without agents interfering with the same branch, ensuring efficient parallel development.
• Use the Right Agent and Model: Mix Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode in PTY or GUI mode, supporting custom model IDs for flexible agent deployment.
• Keep Every Session Within Reach: Seamlessly move between list, board, tabs, split panes, and even your phone without losing conversation context.
• Finish Where the Work Happened: Inspect files and diffs, commit, sync, publish branches, and open pull requests directly from Tessera, integrating the Git workflow.
• Kanban Board for Task Tracking: The Kanban board tracks direct chats and worktree-backed tasks across Chat, Todo, Doing, Review, and Done, providing live agent and diff state visibility.
• Mobile Access: Pair a device for remote access, allowing you to continue PTY and GUI sessions, switch to Chat View, and access files or Git panels from your phone.
• PTY Speed, Chat Readability: Switch between a PTY session and Chat View to turn live terminal conversations into focused, readable threads without stopping the underlying PTY.

Installation

Tessera can be installed as a desktop application, run in a browser via npm, or deployed with Docker Compose.

Desktop App

Download the latest release from the official GitHub Releases page.

• Windows: Portable .exe
• macOS: .dmg for Apple Silicon or Intel
• Linux beta: .deb

Browser Runtime

Requires Node.js 20.9+ (20.x) or Node.js 22–26, plus npm 10 or later.

npm install -g @horang-labs/tessera
tessera

Open the printed local URL in your browser.

Docker Compose

mkdir -p data/config data/local data/ssh data/codex data/tessera workspaces
touch data/gitconfig
docker compose up --build -d

Open http://127.0.0.1:32123. If bind mounts are not writable, use:

sudo chown -R 1000:1000 data workspaces

Examples

Tessera provides powerful features to orchestrate AI agents and manage development workflows.

Agent Orchestration with Tessera CLI

A lead agent can invoke /tessera-cli inside a managed Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode session to coordinate parallel tasks. This allows the lead agent to create isolated worktrees, launch parallel sessions, wait for results, inspect their output, and send follow-up prompts, all while every worker remains visible in Tessera. Representative operations include status, worktree create, session launch, session wait, session read, and session prompt.

Kanban Board Workflow

The integrated Kanban board offers a visual way to track agent tasks. You can move cards through stages like Chat, Todo, Doing, Review, and Done as work progresses. The board displays live agent and diff states, and you can directly open the linked PTY or GUI session without leaving the board, providing a seamless task management experience.

Mobile Remote Access

Tessera allows you to pair a device for remote access, enabling you to continue PTY and GUI sessions from your phone. You can switch a PTY into Chat View and open session, Files, or Git panels directly from your mobile device, ensuring continuity in your workflow.

Links

• GitHub Repository: horang-labs/tessera
• Download Tessera (Releases): GitHub Releases
• npm Package: @horang-labs/tessera
• Join the Design Partner Waitlist: Google Forms