stagewise

stagewise is an open-source agentic IDE built by stagewise GmbH, a Y Combinator-backed company founded by Glenn Töws (CEO) and Julian Götze (CTO). The entire codebase is publicly available on GitHub under the AGPLv3 license, and the project has accumulated over 6,700 stars since its creation in April 2025. It runs locally as a desktop application and connects to any model provider — no lock-in required.

What It Is

stagewise is a next-generation agent orchestrator for software engineers. Rather than a chat-based assistant bolted onto an editor, it functions as a standalone IDE where a coding agent has full access to the developer's environment — including terminal output, browser tabs, console logs, and debugger state. Developers can run multiple agents in parallel, each tackling independent features or bug fixes, while stagewise manages context efficiency and model routing behind the scenes.

Model Sovereignty and Provider Flexibility

A core design principle of stagewise is that developers should never be locked into a single model or provider. The tool supports three distinct access paths:

• stagewise Cloud Inference: Preconfigured access to frontier and open-weight models through a stagewise account — no API keys required to get started.
• BYOK / External subscriptions: Connect existing API keys from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, MiniMax, Mistral, OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, Azure, and Vertex AI.
• Local inference: Run models locally via Ollama, vLLM, LM Studio, or any provider serving the OpenAI Chat Completions API, OpenResponses API, or Anthropic Messages API. The minimum recommended context size is 150k tokens.

Agent Efficiency Architecture

stagewise claims an average cache hit rate of 87.6% by keeping the conversation prefix stable across turns. When the environment changes, the runtime sends a compact state delta rather than rebuilding the full context from scratch. The agent also automatically compresses context as tasks grow, maintaining a focused working set. This design is intended to enable long-running agentic tasks at significantly lower token cost compared to naive context rebuilding.

Enterprise Deployment Model

For teams requiring compliance and control, stagewise offers an enterprise configuration that includes regulatory and audit compliance, global inference and model configuration, access to stagewise Cloud Inference EU, SSO via OIDC and SAML, SCIM provisioning, and optional self-hosting of the stagewise Cloud. The enterprise offering is contact-sales only and documented separately at docs.stagewise.io/enterprise.

Update: stagewise 1.22.0 and Weekly Release Cadence

The project follows an active weekly release cadence, publishing "Release Week" summaries on its news page. As of July 2026, the latest release is stagewise 1.22.0 (published July 17, 2026), with release weeks documented continuously from May through June 2026. A notable announcement from May 8, 2026 declared the project's pivot to becoming "the Open Source Agentic IDE," signaling a broader platform ambition beyond its original browser-focused tooling roots. The repository shows active development with 501 forks and 76 open issues as of the latest data.