Son Piaz

Mandeck

Lets one developer run many coding agents at once and hand work between them.

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The problem #

A developer running Claude Code, Codex and Cursor at once loses track of which window holds what. Each CLI owns its own terminal tab, its own login, and its own memory of the job. Nothing connects them, so the person becomes the wire between every pair of windows.

The approach #

Mandeck is a native macOS terminal where each agent keeps its own CLI and subscription. The deck owns only the panes, and adds a local HTTP API on top. Through it one agent opens a pane for another, reads its screen, and waits. The trade is deliberate: macOS only, no token resale, nothing for anyone to meter.

Where it is now #

Version 0.1.6 shipped on 2026-09-04 and is downloadable from mandeck.dev today, with no signup. Driving the deck from a paired iPhone over an encrypted channel works in that release. Voice control is built and works, but it still sits on a branch, not in a release. I run my own daily work inside it, which is where the bug reports come from.

What happens if this works #

Agent work is moving from one chat at a time to many jobs running unattended. If that holds, a terminal stops being where you type and becomes where you dispatch. Mandeck bets that layer belongs on your own machine and your own subscriptions, not a cloud.

Evidence #

Writing about this #

Notes #

Mandeck started because the bottleneck stopped being the model. Once you run three or four agent CLIs at the same time, the slow part is not any one of them thinking. It is you noticing that one finished, reading what it did, and carrying it to the next window.

So the deck was built around one rule: an agent that hands work to another agent owns that handoff. Spawning a pane is not the end of the job. The deck holds the spawner to it, reminds them to check, and rings the human only if nobody does. A job turns to done on an explicit signal and never on a guess, because a terminal that goes quiet tells you nothing about whether the work landed.

The other decision that shaped it: no accounts, no gateway, no resale. Every pane runs the CLI you already installed, signed in to the subscription you already pay for. That closes the obvious business model and rules out a cloud version. It also means nothing sits between you and your tools, and there is no meter to watch.

It is the tool my other projects get built inside, which is the only quality bar that has held so far.