Multi-backend chat
Five agent CLIs behind one conversation surface. Streaming diffs, tool cards you can re-read, permission prompts that are buttons.
Codelions · desktop tools for people who live in terminals
Two tools.
One philosophy.
We build honest desktop apps for engineers who already live in CLIs. Read the source. Read the diffs. Uninstall without leaving a trace. No telemetry, no hidden state, no invented abstractions.
00 the shape of the work
Agents on the left. Repos on the right.
Both of them legible.
› add a rate limiter to /api/login
opus 5
Planning the change — a token bucket keyed by ip + username, wired into
/api/login, with unit tests.
edit
src/middleware/rateLimit.ts
+22 −0
+ import { bucket } from "./bucket";+ export const loginLimiter = bucket({+ cap: 10, per: "60s",+ key: (req) => `${req.ip}:${req.body.username}`,+ });
worktree feature/rate-limit · 3 files · ready to merge
workspace 3 repos
- api-gatewayfeature/rate-limit+34 −5
- billing-svcfeature/rate-limit+8 −2
- ledger-coremainclean
worksets 2 active
- rate-limit rollout3 repos
- pg14 migration2 repos
pull requests 3 open
- #412rate limiter · api-gatewayapproved
- #88token bucket · billing-svcreview
commit · push · archive — across all three, in one action
The dark panels are the products. Everything else on this page is paper — because a tool should look like a tool.
01 overcli
Five coding agents.
One honest window.
A desktop GUI over claude, codex, gemini, copilot, and ollama.
Conversations, diffs, permission flows, git worktrees, and usage stats in one place — running on the
subscriptions you already pay for.
Agent worktrees
Agents work in isolated git worktrees you can rebase, merge, or throw away from inside the conversation. No terminal context-switch.
Your auth, no new bills
Uses the credentials you already have — Claude Pro, a ChatGPT plan, gcloud creds, a Copilot seat. No API keys to provision.
Workspaces
Projects of projects. Group the repos a piece of work actually spans and drive them together instead of one at a time.
Background agents
Silent agents keep working while you read, review, and roam. Come back to finished diffs, not a scrolled-away log.
Flows & orchestrator
35 open-source flows ship in the box — research → plan → build → review — with an orchestrator that fans work across repos, and schedules that run them without you.
v0.13.2 · beta
macOS · Windows · Linux
Apache 2.0
signed & notarized
02 overgit
Workspaces of repos.
Worksets of work.
A desktop git client built on two orthogonal ideas — a durable lens over the repos you own, and a resumable
ticket that spans them. It never writes inside .git, so your repos behave the same in any other tool.
Workspaces
Durable groupings of repos — "these are Platform," "these are Payments." Fetch all, status all, reset all, as one action.
Worksets
A ticket you can resume across repos, pinned to a feature branch. Spin up, ship, archive, reset — without re-deriving where you were.
Smart safety
Every destructive flow tells you exactly what it is about to throw away, per repo, before it does it. A reset never eats work.
Never touches .git
Overgit is an overlay, not metadata. Uninstall any time and your repos forget it ever existed — no migration, no lock-in.
Review & suggest
AI review and commit-message suggestions on the diff in front of you, plus gh pull requests aggregated across the workspace.
Keyboard first
A command palette over every repo, branch, and workset. Your CLI auth, your git config, your remotes — nothing re-invented.
v0.2.0 · beta
macOS · Windows · Linux
Apache 2.0
plain git underneath
03 the bar we hold ourselves to
Move fast without
losing the thread.
Codelions tools optimize for the fourth afternoon — when you've shipped three things with one, hit a weird edge, and need to understand what happened without breaking stride. The whole point is to keep you moving: a clean local setup where nothing is hidden, so you never stop to untangle what a tool did.
Diffs you can read, tool cards you can read again, permission flows you can follow, history that came from a file on disk. No telemetry. No hidden state. No invented abstractions. If something is on screen, there's a line of code you can find that put it there. That's the bar.
01
Explainable, not clever
Every abstraction is one you'd have to justify out loud. The ones that don't survive that conversation don't ship.
02
Local by default
Your code, your credentials, your machine. Nothing phones home, because there is nothing to phone home with.
03
Reversible
Both tools are overlays. Uninstall and the repos, the auth, and the history are exactly as you left them.
Built by Lionel Farr and his son Owen Farr under Codelions. Open-source — issues and PRs welcome on both repos.
04 questions we actually get
Frequently
asked questions
Why does Codelions exist?
Because the terminal is a great place to run things and a bad place to explore them. Output scrolls away, diffs flash past, and there's nowhere to follow a thread sideways. Both tools give that work a surface you can read, re-read, and reason about — without giving up the CLI underneath.
Who are these tools for?
Engineers who already live in CLIs and want to read the source, read the diffs, and uninstall without leaving a trace. If you'd rather have a hosted black box, these aren't for you — and that's fine.
What does it cost?
Nothing. Both are free and open source under Apache 2.0. Overcli drives the agent subscriptions you already pay for — your Claude Pro plan, ChatGPT plan, gcloud credentials, or Copilot seat. No API keys to provision, no per-seat pricing, no new invoice.
Is there any telemetry?
None. No analytics, no crash reporting, no phone-home on launch. Conversation history is files on disk you can open in any editor. You can verify all of that in the source — that's rather the point.
Can we use this at a company?
Yes. Apache 2.0 covers commercial use, and because everything runs locally against your own credentials there's no vendor in the path of your source code. Both apps build from the repo if your security team would rather compile them itself.
What platforms are supported?
macOS, Windows, and Linux. macOS builds are Developer-ID signed and notarized, so they open on a double-click. Windows isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may still warn. Building from source is one npm run dist away.
Who builds Codelions?
Lionel Farr and his son Owen Farr. Press ? anywhere on this page for the longer story — it explains more about why the tools look the way they do than any feature list would.
Read the source · read the diffs