Welcome to ADE

ADE is the Agentic Development Environment — a desktop app that orchestrates parallel AI coding agents from one control plane.

What is ADE?

ADE (Agentic Development Environment) is a macOS desktop application that lets you run multiple AI coding agents against the same repository without losing control. Each task gets its own isolated workspace (a lane), agents stay context-aware through durable packs, and ADE watches for merge conflicts before they become cleanup work.

ADE is not another AI code editor. It is the orchestration layer that sits between you and your agents — whether they run through Claude, Codex, Cursor, or any other tool.

Think of ADE the way you think about a CI/CD dashboard — except instead of watching pipelines, you’re watching AI agents build features across multiple branches simultaneously.

---

Who is ADE for?

Solo developers

Run 3–5 agents in parallel across different features. Ship a full day’s work in an hour.

Small teams

Share lane templates, automation rules, and AI budgets through a committed ade.yaml. Each developer keeps their own API keys and preferences locally.

Agent power users

Orchestrate multi-step worker runs with planning, validation, and cost tracking. Use the CTO agent to delegate work to specialized workers automatically.

---

How ADE works

1. You define the work

   Describe what you want built — a feature, a fix, a refactor. ADE handles the rest.

2. ADE creates isolated lanes

   Each task gets its own git worktree. Agents never block each other or step on shared files.

3. AI agents execute in parallel

   Claude, Codex, Cursor, or any configured provider works simultaneously across lanes.

4. ADE tracks everything

   Context, conflicts, budgets, sessions, and artifacts — all in one place.

5. You review and merge

   Inspect diffs, approve PRs, and land results with full audit trails.

---

The app at a glance

ADE’s sidebar mirrors this documentation. Each tab in the app has a matching section in the App Guide:

App tab	What it does	Docs
Run	Start your dev stack, manage processes, run tests	Run →
Lanes	Create and manage isolated workspaces	Lanes →
Chat	Talk to AI agents scoped to a lane, worker run, or the CTO	Chat →
Work	Terminal sessions with transcripts and checkpoints	Terminals →
Files	Monaco editor with lane-scoped file trees and diffs	Files →
Graph	Visual topology of lanes, branches, PRs, and conflicts	Graph →
PRs	GitHub PR management with stacked PR support	PRs →
History	Timeline of all operations, sessions, and checkpoints	History →
Automations	Trigger-driven AI rules for PR review, testing, and more	Automations →
Workers	Structured multi-step AI execution with audit trails	Workers →
CTO	Always-on project agent with workers and Linear sync	CTO →
Settings	AI providers, integrations, permissions, budgets	Settings →

Press ⌘K anywhere in ADE to open the Command Palette — a fuzzy-searchable jump-to for every tab, lane, and recent action. Use G followed by a letter (e.g. G L for Lanes, G R for PRs) to jump between sections by keyboard alone.

Click the Help icon in the top bar to open the Help menu. The first entry — Start Full Tutorial — runs the in-app guided tour of every tab (Lanes, Graph, Files, Work, Git actions, PRs, History, Run, Automations, CTO, Settings) and hands off to shorter per-tab tours as it goes. Below the full tutorial, the menu also lists focused tours for each tab so you can jump straight to one.

---

Start here

Install and set up

Download ADE, connect a provider, and open your first project. Takes about 5 minutes.

Learn the concepts

Understand lanes, packs, worker runs, the CTO, and how they fit together before diving in.

Follow the quickstart

A checklist that walks you from install to your first working agent in one session.

Explore the app guide

Jump straight into the feature documentation organized by app tab.