Tyler J. Peckenpaugh / Agentic development
Agent tooling landscape
The agent tools I looked at for The control plane got crowded, sorted into the planes from the tooling anatomy. Each entry links to the source it's based on. As of November 12, 2026.
A working interpretation, not a ranking. Plane assignments are my judgment about where most of a tool's work lands. T3 Code, Orca and Gas Town were read from source without being run; the rest come from vendor pages and repositories, which change quickly.
Tools by plane
| Tool | Kind | Planes | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cursor 3 | Agent IDE | ControlDelivery | Rebuilt in April 2026 around a workspace for running local and cloud agents side by side. |
| Google Antigravity 2.0 | Agent IDE | ControlDelivery | Moved agent management into a standalone desktop app, separate from the editor, in May 2026. |
| Devin Desktop | Agent IDE | ControlDelivery | Formerly Windsurf. Opens to an Agent Command Center, a board of local and cloud agents, and runs ACP agents. |
| JetBrains Air | Agent IDE | ControlDelivery | An agentic development environment for delegating coding tasks to agents; public preview from March 2026. |
| WarpAGPL-3.0 (client) | Terminal | ControlDelivery | Calls itself an agentic development environment; its client was open-sourced in April 2026. |
| GitHub Agent HQ | Platform | ControlDelivery | Mission Control for Copilot, Claude and Codex sessions, tied to issues and pull requests. |
| Agent Client ProtocolApache-2.0 | Protocol | Control | Started by Zed so one interface can drive many agents; has an agent registry and support from JetBrains and others. |
| T3 CodeMIT | Agent workspace | ControlDelivery | A server with web, desktop and mobile clients that drives the agents you already have through their own protocols, with worktrees on request. About 57,000 stars. |
| OrcaMIT | Agent workspace | ControlDelivery | Desktop app with a worktree per task, status hooks for each agent, and a CLI that lets agents start and message other agents. About 122,000 stars. |
| NimbalystMIT | Agent workspace | ControlDelivery | Formerly Crystal. Runs agents in parallel and lets you edit their work visually in markdown, mockups and diagrams, and track tasks. |
| Conductor | Agent workspace | ControlDelivery | Mac app for running agents in worktrees. Its site now says it is joining Meta. |
| Vibe KanbanApache-2.0 | Agent board | ControlDelivery | Local kanban board that runs an agent per card. Bloop shut down in April 2026 and the project is now community maintained. |
| KandevAGPL-3.0 | Agent board | ControlDelivery | Self-hosted kanban for orchestrating agents, reviewing changes and opening pull requests. |
| Claude SquadAGPL-3.0 | Terminal | Control | Manages several terminal agents, each in its own worktree. |
| Gas TownMIT | Agent organization | ControlDelivery | Named roles: a mayor assigns work, a witness checks on stuck workers, a refinery runs a merge queue. Built on Beads. |
| BeadsMIT | Shared state | Control | Issue tracker for agents. Data now lives in a versioned database under its own Git ref. |
| PaperclipMIT | Agent organization | Control | Open-source orchestration for teams of agents: org charts, budgets, tickets and scheduled check-ins. |
| MCP Agent Mail | Shared state | Control | Messages between agents plus advisory file reservations with an expiry and an optional pre-commit guard. Deprecated in favor of a Rust rewrite, mcp_agent_mail_rust. |
| Kiro | Spec-driven IDE | KnowledgeDelivery | Each spec produces requirements, design and task files before implementation. |
| Spec KitMIT | Spec framework | KnowledgeDelivery | Commands that take a feature from specification to technical plan to tasks. |
| OpenSpecMIT | Spec framework | Knowledge | Spec-driven development for AI coding assistants, with specs kept in the repository. |
| BMAD-METHODMIT | Spec framework | KnowledgeDelivery | Briefs, specifications and architecture that it says keep decisions explicit and carry context forward. |
| Augment Intent | Agent workspace | KnowledgeControl | A coordinator agent writes a spec for each task that every agent in the workspace works from. |
| Backlog.mdMIT | Task tracker | KnowledgeControl | Each task is a markdown file in the repository, with a CLI, an MCP server and a local kanban web UI. |
| SuperpowersMIT | Skills | KnowledgeDelivery | Skills for brainstorming, planning, test-driven development, review and verification. |
Star counts are from GitHub on November 12, 2026.
How policy reaches workers
How each of the three tools I read passes a project's instructions to the agents it starts, in the mechanism terms from the tooling anatomy.
| Tool | How | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| T3 Code | Leaves it to the agent. When it starts Claude Code through the SDK, it asks it to load project settings and instruction files. | Harness loads instruction files |
| Orca | Runs the agent's own CLI in the worktree, so it reads the same instruction files. Its orchestration guide also tells the coordinator to put constraints in each worker's task spec. | Harness loads instruction files; agent-directed prose |
| Gas Town | A session-start hook runs gt prime, which injects the role's instructions plus operator-written role directives that override the workflow where they conflict. | Harness hook injects role policy |
Where shared state could live
Options for recording which agent has claimed which task and which files it is changing, so agents in other worktrees can see it. This is an open question, not a recommendation.
| Where | Example | Visible to | Owned by |
|---|---|---|---|
| The tool's own database | Orca, T3 Code (SQLite and JSON in your home directory) | Every agent that tool starts | The tool |
| Files committed to the repository | Beads' original design | Other branches only after merging | The project |
| A coordination server | MCP Agent Mail's file reservations | Every agent connected to the server | The server |
| A versioned database under a Git ref | Beads today, using Dolt | Every worktree; other machines by push and fetch | The tool, stored in the repository |
| The shared .git directory or custom Git refs | Beads' database uses a ref; I found no tool keeping simple claim records this way | Every worktree; refs also by push and fetch | Undecided |