thClaws 🦞

Open-source Agent Harness Platform — a native AI agent workspace that codes, automates, remembers, and coordinates. Runs on your own machine. Sovereign by design.

thClaws is a native-Rust AI agent workspace that runs locally on your machine. Not just coding — it edits code, automates workflows, searches your knowledge bases, and coordinates teams of agents, all in one binary. You tell it what you want in natural language; it reads your files, runs commands, uses tools, and talks back to you while it works.

Three interfaces, one binary

• Desktop GUI (thclaws) — a native window with Terminal, Chat, Files, and optional Team tabs.
• CLI REPL (thclaws --cli) — an interactive terminal prompt for SSH, headless servers, or when you want zero GUI overhead.
• Non-interactive mode (thclaws -p "prompt") — runs a single turn and exits. Handy for scripts, CI pipelines, and shell one-liners.

What makes it different

• Multi-provider. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Alibaba DashScope, OpenRouter, Ollama (local and Anthropic-compatible), and Agentic Press — auto-detected by model name prefix. Switch mid-session with /model or swap the whole provider with /provider.

• Any knowledge worker, not just engineers. Chat tab for researchers, PMs, ops, legal, marketing, finance — natural-language prompts, file access, knowledge-base lookup, drafting. Terminal tab for engineers who want the raw REPL. Same engine, same sessions, same config — different preferred surface.

• Open standards, not a walled garden. Built on the conventions the agent-tooling industry is converging on, not bespoke formats you have to learn only for us. Model Context Protocol for tool servers. AGENTS.md for project instructions — the vendor-neutral standard adopted by Google, OpenAI, Factory, Sourcegraph, and Cursor. SKILL.md with YAML frontmatter for packaged workflows. Your configuration is portable between thClaws, other agents that speak the same standards, and whatever comes next.

• Skills. Reusable expert workflows packaged as a directory with SKILL.md plus optional scripts. The agent picks the right skill automatically when a request matches the whenToUse trigger, or you can invoke one explicitly as /<skill-name>. Install from a git URL or .zip archive with /skill install.

• MCP servers. Plug in tools built by third parties — GitHub, filesystems, databases, browsers, Slack, and more. Both stdio and HTTP Streamable transports, with OAuth 2.1 + PKCE for protected servers. Add one with /mcp add or ship a .mcp.json in your project.

• Plugin system. Skills + commands + agent definitions + MCP servers bundled under a single manifest, installable from git or .zip. One install, one uninstall, one version to pin — ideal for sharing a team's extensions.

• Memory & project instructions. Drop an AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) in your repo — thClaws walks up from cwd and injects every match into the system prompt. A persistent memory store holds longer-lived facts the agent has learned about you, classified as user / feedback / project / reference and stored as markdown you can read, edit, or commit.

• Knowledge bases (KMS). Per-project and per-user wikis the agent can search and read on demand. Drop markdown pages under .thclaws/kms/<name>/pages/, give each a one-line entry in index.md, and the agent gets a table of contents every turn plus KmsRead / KmsSearch tools. No embeddings — grep + read, following Andrej Karpathy's LLM-wiki pattern.

• Agent orchestration. Delegate subtasks to isolated sub-agents via the Task tool — each gets its own tool registry and can recurse up to 3 levels deep. Scale further with Agent Teams: multiple thClaws processes coordinating through a shared mailbox and task queue, each in its own tmux pane and optional git worktree. One agent writes your backend while a teammate builds the frontend in parallel, lead merges the branches when both are done.

• Settings as one file. Every knob — permission mode, thinking budget, allowed/disallowed tools, provider endpoints, KMS attachments — lives in .thclaws/settings.json (project) or ~/.config/thclaws/settings.json (user). API keys go in the OS keychain by default (macOS Keychain / Windows Credential Manager / Linux Secret Service) with .env fallback for CI.

• Safety first. A filesystem sandbox scopes file tools to the working directory. Destructive shell commands are flagged before execution. You approve every mutating tool call unless you've opted into auto-approve.

• Offline-capable. Ollama (native and Anthropic-compatible) lets you run entirely against a local model — no cloud round-trip, no API key.

• Deploy what you build. Ship the landing pages, web apps, APIs, and AI agents you create through Agentic Press Hosting (partnered with SIS Cloud Service and Artech.Cloud) — or any other host you prefer. Schedule agents on cron, respond to webhooks, stream from public URLs. The deploy flow ships as a plugin (/plugin install …-deploy), so hosts are swappable; the client never locks you in.

• Shell escape. Prefix any REPL line with ! to run a shell command directly — no tokens, no approval prompt, no agent round-trip (! git status, ! ls, etc.).

Installation

Pre-built binaries

Download the latest release for your platform from the Releases page or from thclaws.ai/downloads.

Supported: macOS (Apple Silicon & Intel), Windows (x86_64 & ARM64), Linux (x86_64 & ARM64).

Build from source

Prerequisites: Rust 1.85+, Node.js 20+, pnpm 9+.

git clone https://github.com/thClaws/thClaws.git
cd thClaws

# Build frontend (React + Vite, bundled as a single HTML file)
cd frontend && pnpm install && pnpm build && cd ..

# Build Rust (CLI + GUI)
cargo build --release --features gui --bin thclaws

# Run
./target/release/thclaws          # GUI
./target/release/thclaws --cli    # CLI
./target/release/thclaws -p "what does src/main.rs do?"  # one-shot

Quick start

# First run: pick a secrets backend (OS keychain or .env) when prompted
thclaws

# Configure a provider (inside the REPL)
❯ /provider anthropic
❯ /model claude-sonnet-4-6

# Or try OpenRouter for 300+ models via one key
❯ /provider openrouter
❯ /model openrouter/anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6

# Drop an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md in your repo — it's read automatically

# Useful slash commands
❯ /help         # list everything
❯ /models       # list available models for the current provider
❯ /kms          # list attached knowledge bases
❯ /skill install https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git
❯ /mcp add github https://mcp.github.com
❯ ! git status  # shell escape

Configuration

thClaws reads settings in this precedence order (higher wins):

1. CLI flags
2. .thclaws/settings.json (project)
3. ~/.config/thclaws/settings.json (user)
4. ~/.claude/settings.json (fallback location)
5. Compiled-in defaults

Open-standard files are honored directly:

• CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md — system prompt additions, walked up from cwd
• .thclaws/skills/ / .claude/skills/ — skill catalog
• .thclaws/agents/ / .claude/agents/ — subagent definitions
• .mcp.json / .thclaws/mcp.json — MCP server configuration
• .thclaws-plugin/plugin.json / .claude-plugin/plugin.json — plugin manifest

API keys are never stored in config files — only in the OS keychain (default) or .env.

Documentation

• Official site — thclaws.ai
• Full user manual — thclaws.ai/manual (soon) or the user-manual/ companion repo. 24 chapters covering every feature plus 7 walkthrough case studies (static site deploy, Node.js reservation site, news-aggregation agent, etc.).
• Contributing — dev setup, PR flow, commit style
• Changelog — version history
• Code of Conduct — Contributor Covenant 2.1
• Security — vulnerability disclosure

For books, training, and commercial deployment, see agentic-press.com.

License

Dual-licensed under either:

• MIT License
• Apache License 2.0

at your option. Contributions are accepted under the same dual license.

About

thClaws is developed by ThaiGPT Co., Ltd. and published under a dual MIT/Apache-2.0 license. The client is free and open source forever. Enterprise Edition, hosting, and support are commercial offerings — see agentic-press.com or contact [email protected].

Built in Thailand. Meant for the world.