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
Three 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, repos, and databases.
All 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
› select status, count(*) from orders group by 1
fan-out 3 of 3 ok
- refundedlocal 3 · staging 4prod 41
- pending_reviewprod only+7
- paidwithin 1%match
schema drift staging vs prod
- orders.refund_reasonmissing on stagingbreaking
- orders_customer_idxstaging onlynotable
read-only by default · layered safeguards
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, flows, standing workers, 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 & everyday projects
Projects of projects — group the repos a piece of work actually spans and drive them together. Or no repo at all: an everyday project is a folder of documents with an undo history, and git is never mentioned.
Standing workers
Hire a persona that wakes on its own clock, proposes what's worth doing, and files what it makes. On probation until you promote it, and the whole crew spends from one monthly pot you approve once. Silent background agents still run alongside them.
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. The same YAML also runs headlessly from a CLI, so a flow you authored at your desk can ship to CI.
02 overgit
A complete git client.
Built for many repos.
Staging, history, the branch graph, rebase, worktrees, and per-repo commit identity, plus what no other client
has: workspaces that act on a group of repos, and worksets that carry one ticket across 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.
A full git client
Changes, history, graph, stash, rebase and cherry-pick, worktrees, submodules, and a "Committing as" line that shows which email a commit will use. ⌘K and ⌘B reach all of it.
v0.3.0 · beta
macOS · Windows · Linux
Apache 2.0
plain git underneath
signed & notarized
03 overdb · coming soon
Every query, every plan.
Every environment.
A desktop database client with completion from your real schema, searchable query history, and performance tools that show where a plan went wrong. It can also run one query across local, staging, and prod and diff the results. Every connection starts read-only, with safeguards matched to each engine.
The everyday work
Browse a table, filter and sort on the server, and edit a value in place with the UPDATE shown first. Completion from the catalog writes joins for you, and every statement you run is kept and searchable.
Environments and drift
Run one query across local, staging, and prod and diff the results against a baseline. Schema drift is ranked breaking, notable, or quiet.
Read-only, with layered safeguards
Postgres, MySQL, and SQLite use engine-level read-only modes. DynamoDB fails closed in the client; a read-only IAM policy is the durable boundary. Turning on writes for prod means typing its name.
Build a query with your AI
Describe what you want in plain words and your claude, codex, or gemini login writes the SQL into your editor. Nothing runs on its own, and result rows are not intentionally added to prompts.
Performance you can act on
The plan drawn as a river: as wide as the rows in flight, narrowing where the WHERE throws them away and flaring where a loop multiplies them. Plus estimate versus actual and slow queries from the server itself.
Ten databases, done properly
PostgreSQL, Redshift, Aurora, CockroachDB, and TimescaleDB; MySQL, MariaDB, and Aurora MySQL; SQLite and DynamoDB. Overdb detects which one it's connected to and handles where they differ.
pre-v0.1 · coming soon
macOS · Windows · Linux
Apache 2.0
read-only by default
04 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
Every tool is an overlay. Uninstall and the repos, the databases, the auth, and the history are exactly as you left them.
Built by Lionel Farr and his son Owen Farr under Codelions. Overcli and overgit are open source — issues and PRs welcome. Overdb is coming soon.
05 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. Each tool gives 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. Overcli and overgit are free and open source under Apache 2.0, and overdb is planned to join them when it is ready. 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 in the app. 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. The apps build from source 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