Cradle

Cradle is a desktop-first AI agent management platform built by independent developer wibus-wee. It sits one layer above individual AI coding tools — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI, and anything speaking an OpenAI-compatible protocol — and brings them all into a single native application. The project is open source, free forever, and runs on macOS 14+, Windows, and Linux.

What It Is

Cradle is an agent orchestration command center for developers who run multiple AI coding tools simultaneously. Rather than replacing any individual agent, it acts as the coordination layer: managing sessions, tracking issues on a Kanban board, gating handoffs on CI results or human reviews, and providing a visual diff viewer for agent-produced code changes. The project describes itself as "one layer above your AI tools" and is built local-first with no cloud relay and no telemetry.

Core Workflow

Cradle organizes work into three stages the homepage describes as "connect, coordinate, ship":

• Connect agents — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Copilot, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and custom runners via the plugin SDK are all brought under one sidebar.
• Coordinate work — Agents can be chained, gated on CI passing or a PR review approving, and handed off automatically. The Session Await feature suspends a session until an external condition fires, then resumes the agent exactly where it left off.
• Ship with confidence — Sessions, checkpoints, and history are persisted on disk so nothing is lost across restarts or laptop closes.

Six Key Surfaces

The README lists 20 major product areas grouped into five workflows. The homepage highlights six primary surfaces:

• Workspace — A unified sidebar for every agent, session, and project with live status at a glance.
• Issue Tracking / Kanban — A built-in board with workflow statuses, milestones, comments, and one-click agent delegation. A first-party plugin syncs with GitHub Issues.
• Cradle Diffs — A side-by-side visual diff viewer for every file an agent touched, with inline approve/reject/request-changes controls.
• Design Mode — Click any element in the running app, sketch or describe a change, and the agent receives the component code plus a screenshot as context before writing the edit.
• Plugin System — Official and community plugins extend Cradle; a Plugin SDK exposes server, web, and desktop entry points. Built-in plugins include a browser-use MCP adapter, system-info, GitHub Issues bridge, and a Slack conversation bridge.
• Local-first data — API keys live in the system keychain, sessions stay on disk, and no data leaves the machine.

Multi-Agent Parallelism

A highlighted capability is running multiple instances of the same agent — or different agents — on the same codebase simultaneously. Each agent gets its own task, Kanban card, and live status indicator. Cradle's coordination layer prevents conflicts and keeps the developer oriented across all parallel workers without requiring manual window management.

Current Status

The GitHub repository was created in May 2026 and was last pushed in August 2026, indicating active early development. The README notes the project is "still in the early stages of development" and welcomes contributions. Built-in plugins are marked Beta or WIP. The repository is written in TypeScript and uses Electron for the desktop shell. Development requires Node.js 22.15.0 or newer and pnpm 11.2.2. The project has no OSI-approved license specified in the repository despite being described as open source and free forever on the homepage.