Open Session

Open Session is an open-source, self-hosted agent orchestrator built by Tella, the team behind the screen-recording product of the same name. It provides a web UI, desktop shell, and mobile PWA for running coding agents against your own repositories on hardware you control. The project is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub under the tellahq/opensession repository.

What It Is

Open Session sits between your team and AI coding agents, giving every session its own Git worktree, branch, transcript, model selection, and execution context. It drives coding sessions through the Pi agent engine and supports multiple model providers and API keys simultaneously. The result is a "control room" where engineers can launch, watch, steer, and review agent work — all from one place — without sending code or keys to a third-party cloud.

How Sessions and Workspaces Work

The core concept is the session: a durable, steerable conversation with an agent that carries its own transcript, model, prompt queue, and visible state.

• Code sessions run in an isolated Git worktree, can edit files, run tests, and open a pull request.
• Ask sessions are read-only and suited for research, planning, or codebase Q&A.
• Workspaces group related sessions; each session gets its own tab, agent, model, and transcript, but all sessions in a workspace share the same branch and worktree.
• Sub-agents let a session delegate work to other agents so the main session stays focused.
• Sessions end in a pull request: the diff and review appear beside the transcript that produced them.

Multiplayer and Collaboration

Open Session is designed for team use, not solo hacking. Any session can be shared as a link; collaborators see the transcript update live, can see who else is present, and can send the next turn or answer a question the agent raised. The announcement page states that everyone at Tella uses Open Session — not just for product development but also for operations, support, data analysis, and finance — and that since July 2026, the vendor claims 80% of code shipped to Tella has come from Open Session.

Automations, Desk Mode, and Walkthroughs

Beyond interactive sessions, Open Session ships several team-oriented features:

• Automations run sessions on schedules, webhooks, or watched channels (Slack, Linear, Plain, GitHub), each scoped to an allowlist of tools.
• Desk mode is a persistent session with access to the entire server as context, useful for standup-style questions like "what's being worked on right now?" and for kicking off sub-agents.
• Walkthroughs are written summaries of completed agent work, including screenshots and demo videos, designed to speed up review when multiple agents are running in parallel.
• Reports pair with automations to generate periodic findings on SEO performance, feature requests, support patterns, stale PRs, and more.

Self-Hosting and Setup Path

Installation is a single curl command that runs on Linux, macOS, or WSL2 on Windows. The installer downloads a compiled release, unpacks it under ~/.opensession, installs the claude CLI, writes a default configuration, and starts a per-user service (LaunchAgent on macOS, systemd --user on Linux). Optional flags add Tailscale, Caddy with TLS, or Cloudflare Tunnel for safe remote access. The README estimates 5–15 minutes for a fresh install, mostly unattended download.

Clients include a web UI served by the server itself, a PWA for mobile home screens, a macOS Electron desktop shell, a native Swift app for iOS and macOS, and a Chrome extension. All five front ends talk to the same self-hosted instance.

Update: v0.4.56

The latest release is v0.4.56, published on 2 September 2026. The repository was created in June 2026 and has seen active development, with the last push recorded on 8 September 2026. The project has accumulated 363 stars and 26 forks on GitHub in its first few months. The roadmap signals continued client expansion, with a native iOS app listed as coming soon alongside the existing PWA.