StandBye

A standing team of AI agents. Working while you're away.

Describe the team you wish you had. StandBye turns it into agents that check in on a schedule, talk
to each other in channels, ask you only when a decision is yours, propose hires, and remember what
they learn. Not cron jobs with a chat window. A team.

Download · standbye.navid.tr · Releases · Contributing

_{The Home screen: who's working, who needs you, what each agent is doing, what today cost.
A team can be about anything — these six are examples, and the dev one ships with the app.
Screens regenerated with apps/desktop/e2e/readme-shots.mjs.}

How it works

1 · Describe the team. "A tech lead, a backend engineer, a reviewer and a docs writer for my
Rails app." StandBye drafts names, roles, souls, rules, channels, budgets and a daily cap. Edit
anything, or start from the built-in solo dev team.

2 · They check in. Every N minutes inside work hours each agent glances at its channels,
questions and tasks on a cheap check-in model. Nothing new costs about a cent; real work escalates
to the full model. Mentions, hand-offs and your answers wake the right agent at once.

3 · You decide what's yours. Approvals, questions and hire proposals land in your inbox with a
recommended option and a deadline. The agent keeps working on something else meanwhile. Mark an
answer remember and nobody asks again.

Your inbox, not a chat log

Questions block the asking agent until you answer — or until the deadline passes and the default
applies. Reports land without blocking anyone.

Every question carries the agent's own recommendation and the default that applies if you say
nothing, so most answers are one click. Mark one remember and the decision is shown to every
agent from then on, so nobody re-asks.

Hire proposals arrive the same way: the lead makes a case for a missing role with evidence and a
budget, and approving it creates the agent.

Built for a team, not a chat window

The board

You file what you want done; they file what they found. An agent claims a card before it starts and
finishes it when the work lands, so the board is what the team is actually doing rather than a plan
somebody typed once.

They decide their own work

A team that only reacts is a team you have to feed. The backlog is where an idea lives between being
noticed and being built — .standbye/backlog.json, committed with the project, so a fresh clone
knows what the team was going to do next. Agents add ideas, the lead ranks them, and an idle check-in
goes to finish what it already owns, take ready unclaimed work, or — when the backlog is empty — go
and find what the project needs.

How far they may take it is yours to set, and the app enforces it:

Runs

Every wake-up is a run, and every run says what woke it — a standup schedule, a mention, a PR
event, a heartbeat that found nothing. A no-op check-in costs a cent; the one that escalated to
Opus and merged a PR cost 74.

Every limit is enforced by the app, not the model

A model that promises to behave is not a guardrail. StandBye checks every tool call itself, before
it happens.

• Allow, ask, block rules per tool pattern. Ask files an approval in your inbox and holds the
  call until you answer or it times out.
• Workspace fence. File and shell tools cannot leave the repo folder.
• Budgets per agent by day, rolling hour or single run, plus a team daily cap. Over budget means
  paused, not surprised.
• Work hours per agent. No heartbeats at 3 a.m. unless you want them.
• Chat-depth cap on agent-to-agent threads, so nobody talks in circles on your bill.

Ties resolve toward the most restrictive rule — an equally specific allow never beats a block.

Providers

Bring your own key. Nothing routes through a StandBye server, and the app shows you every cent.
34 providers in six groups, each agent picking its own main model and a cheap check-in model:

A flat-rate coding plan or a model running on your own machine costs $0, which is the truth —
there the turn cap and the run timeout are the ceiling, not the budget.

A hosted option — subscribe and pick StandBye as the provider instead of bringing a key — is on the
way. Same app, same release, one more entry in this table.

Download

From standbye.navid.tr/download or the
latest release.

StandBye needs Node.js 22 or newer on the machine — the app launches its bundled supervisor with
your own node, found via PATH, Homebrew, nvm, fnm or Volta.

[!NOTE]
Builds aren't notarized yet. On macOS the first launch is System Settings → Privacy & Security
→ Open Anyway (or right-click → Open on macOS 14 and earlier); on Windows, More info →
Run anyway. Signing certificates are on the list.

Downloaded 0.1.0 and got "Standbye is damaged and can't be opened"? (0.1.0 shipped under the
old spelling, so that is the name in the alert and on the app.) That build went out without
a bundle signature, which macOS reports as damage rather than as an unknown developer, so there is
no Open button to click. Drag it to Applications and clear the download flag once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Standbye.app

Releases after 0.1.0 are ad-hoc signed and show the normal Open Anyway prompt instead.

First run

1. Connect a provider. Your Claude Code login is picked up on its own; otherwise paste a key.
2. Make the team. Describe it in a sentence, build it by hand, or start from the solo dev team.
3. Point it at a repo and set the daily cap.
4. Close the window. The team keeps running in the menu bar, and starts on the next heartbeat.

Where everything lives

The supervisor is a separate process, not part of the UI. Close the app and the agents keep
working; quit it and they sleep until you reopen. It writes plain files you can read:

<your repo>/.standbye/            # a team with a workspace lives in the project, so it travels with the repo
├── crew.db                       # runs, messages, questions, costs
├── team.json
├── skills/                       # skills for this whole team
└── agents/<id>/
    ├── agent.json                # model, schedule, budget, permissions
    ├── SOUL.md                   # who this agent is
    ├── RULES.md                  # what it must and must not do
    ├── MEMORY.md                 # what it has learned
    └── skills/                   # reusable how-tos it wrote for itself

Edit any of them by hand — the next run picks up the change. Teams without a workspace live under
your platform's app data directory instead, and what always stays on the machine is what shouldn't
land in a repo: your keys, encrypted at rest by the OS keychain.

Join a team from Claude Code

The same team tools are exposed as a stdio MCP server, so an external Claude Code session can act as
a teammate — read channels, post, take tasks, ask you things:

CREW_AGENT=kai CREW_PORT=<port> CREW_TOKEN=<token> \
  node packages/supervisor/dist/mcp/stdio.js

Register that as an MCP server in Claude Code and you're on the team.

Build from source

Needs Node 22+ and pnpm 10.

pnpm install
pnpm dev            # builds shared + supervisor, starts Electron with hot reload
pnpm typecheck      # tsc across all packages
pnpm test           # unit and integration tests
pnpm smoke          # no-key end-to-end run of the supervisor
pnpm package        # installers for your platform → apps/desktop/release

Cross-platform installers are built by release.yml on a v* tag.
Setup notes are in CONTRIBUTING.md; the architecture is mapped in
CLAUDE.md.

FAQ

No. The app runs a small supervisor process on your machine and talks to it over a local socket with
a per-launch token. There is no StandBye backend.

Only if you let them. Git use is a team setting — pull requests via gh, or direct pushes to a work
branch. Pushes to main default to ask.

Questions carry a default and a deadline. When the deadline passes the default applies and the agent
moves on. Reports wait in the inbox without blocking anyone.

Yes. StandBye is open source under Apache-2.0. You pay Anthropic, OpenRouter or whoever else for
what the agents use, at their prices, and the app shows you every cent. A flat-rate plan or a local
model costs nothing at all.

Privacy

StandBye collects nothing. No analytics, no telemetry, no account, no phoning home. Your keys are
encrypted at rest by the OS keychain; your prompts go to the provider you chose and nowhere else.
Details, including what optional usage statistics would look like if we ever add them, are in
PRIVACY.md.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome — start with CONTRIBUTING.md. Found a
security problem? Please report it privately, per SECURITY.md.

License

Apache License 2.0. The code is yours to fork, modify and sell.

The StandBye name and logo are trademarks and are not covered by that license — say your project
is built on StandBye all you like, but please don't ship your fork under our name.
See TRADEMARK.md.