Orca Review: The IDE Built for Parallel Coding Agents

Orca, an open-source Agent Development Environment (ADE) for running multiple coding agents in parallel, has gained 7,747 stars on GitHub with 1,949 new stars in the last week. Built by Stably AI, the desktop app allows developers to run agents like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor side-by-side in isolated git worktrees, with a mobile companion for remote monitoring. The recent surge in popularity follows the release of SSH worktrees, an account switcher with usage tracking, and the general availability of the iOS companion app.

Originally published on— visit the original for any updates, code snippets that aged out, or follow-up posts. andrew.ooo Orca is the open-source "ADE" Agent Development Environment for developers running multiple coding agents in parallel. It just hit 7,747 stars with 1,949 new in the last 7 days . The pitch: run Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, or Pi side-by-side , each in its own isolated git worktree, in one desktop app — with a real mobile companion to steer the swarm from your phone. orca worktree create , snapshot , click , fill so agents can drive Orca itselfIf you've been running three terminal panes Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and cd -ing between worktrees — Orca is the tool you've been building badly in your head. | Field | Value | |---|---| Repo | | brew install --cask stablyai/orca/orca / AURIn 2026 most "10x" developers are running three to five coding agents at once. The workflow has stabilised in the wild: spin off a worktree, send Claude Code at it; spin off another, send Codex; spin off a third, send Cursor; compare three diffs, cherry-pick the best parts, merge. The tooling for this is terrible . You juggle tmux panes, git worktree add invocations, browser tabs for PR review, a Linear tab, Discord for notifications, and a vague feeling that you don't know which agent has finished. Most "agent IDE" projects either lock you into one agent Cursor, Windsurf or assume you run them one at a time. Orca's bet is that the parallel part is the whole point — you want one orchestration shell for any agent , and a phone in your pocket that pings you when any of them finishes. Built by Stably AI https://onorca.dev , the project ships daily; the 1,949-stars-this-week jump aligns with the v0.x release that added SSH worktrees and Design Mode. Three things converged this week: The mobile companion shipped to general iOS App Store. TestFlight-only until early June; the full release brought a wave of fence-sitters. Account switcher + usage tracking solved a hot problem. Anthropic and OpenAI tightened rate limits and tier visibility in May/June 2026. Orca's hot-swap between Claude accounts + live rate-limit resets made it the answer for the "how do I survive multiple Claude tiers" complaint. SSH worktrees landed. Cloud-dev workflows Codespaces, Gitpod live in a browser. Orca — run agents on a beefy remote box but keep the local desktop polish — picked up the "I don't want to live in a browser" segment. Orca's framing is that an ADE Agent Development Environment is different from an IDE in three structural ways: | Dimension | Classic IDE | Orca ADE | |---|---|---| Primary actor | Human typing code | Agent typing code, human reviewing | Workspace unit | One repo, one branch | N agents × N worktrees per task | Notification model | Build/test results | "Agent finished" / "Agent needs input" | Mobile presence | None rarely | First-class companion app | Diff workflow | Manual git operations | Annotate-and-ship-back-to-agent diffs | If you've spent any time running agents at this scale, you've felt every one of those gaps. Orca is the first tool I've seen treat them as design primitives rather than features bolted on top of an editor. The parallel-worktrees flow is the strongest demo of why Orca exists. You write one prompt — say, "Add OAuth2 support to the user service, with tests" — and Orca: .orca/worktrees/ .The novel UX is the merge worktree — instead of three diffs in three terminals and git cherry-pick -ing by hand, Orca gives you a 3-pane diff with checkboxes per hunk. Check the Claude Code result for the auth headers, the Codex result for tests, the Cursor result for the README; Orca builds a merge commit on a fresh worktree. Orca treats the agent as a swappable runtime, not a vendor lock-in. The supported list is genuinely "any CLI agent" — they ship pre-configured integrations for the heavyweights: | Tier | Agents | |---|---| Major coding agents | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, OpenCode, Amp | Frontier model CLIs | Grok, Kimi, Qwen Code, Mistral Vibe | Autonomous agent platforms | Devin, Pi, oh-my-pi, Hermes Agent Nous Research | Open-source agents | Goose Block , Cline, Continue, Charm Crush, Auggie Augment , Kilo, Codebuff | Specialized / vertical | Droid Factory , Antigravity Google , Rovo Dev Atlassian , Kiro, Command Code, MiMo Code Xiaomi | Bring your own | Any CLI agent that runs in a terminal — Orca just spawns it in the worktree | The bring-your-own path is one TOML config away — if your-agent --version works in a shell, Orca can wrap it. The Orca CLI makes everything scriptable: Create a worktree for a task orca worktree create feature/oauth-support --agent claude-code Fan a prompt across multiple agents orca worktree fan "Add OAuth2 to user service with tests" \ --agents claude-code,codex,cursor --count 3 Snapshot worktree state orca snapshot create --name "before-merge" Drive the embedded browser Design Mode orca browser click " submit-button" orca browser fill "input name=email " "test@example.com" Computer Use — let an agent operate desktop apps orca computer-use --agent claude-code --task "open Notion and find the Q3 spec" The config lives at ~/.config/orca/config.toml : agents.claude-code command = "claude-code" default model = "claude-opus-4-7" worktree base dir = ".orca/worktrees" auto cleanup = false ssh.remote-box host = "build-server.internal" user = "andrew" identity = "~/.ssh/id ed25519" The SSH block unlocks "run agents on a 96-core remote box, drive them from a MacBook Air." Auto-reconnect and port forwarding work without intervention; the local app feels identical whether the worktree is at ~/repo or on the other end of SSH. The feature most underrated in the README is Design Mode , which is what every web-app dev has been wanting in a coding agent UI for two years. You open an embedded Chromium browser on your localhost dev server. You click any element on the page. Orca packages up: …and drops the bundle into your agent's prompt textarea pre-formatted. You add "make this card responsive on mobile" and hit send. The agent has everything it needs without you copy-pasting selectors or describing the visual layout. This is the workflow that paid IDEs Cursor, Windsurf have been promising for a while and which Orca shipped first as open source. The honest answer: yes, for specific patterns . The mobile app isn't a full agent IDE — you can't write code on your phone. What it does well: In practice: kick off three parallel agents on the desktop, walk away, get pings when each finishes, glance at the diff on the phone, approve or reject. Enormously better than "remember to check back in 45 minutes." Daily-ship velocity = occasional rough edges. The README says "we ship daily, so this feature list is perpetually behind." Bugs sometimes ship too; fixes typically land within 24 hours. Pinning a version for team rollouts is wise. Electron-class app footprint. Not Tauri — Orca is a full Electron-style app. ~250 MB DMG, 400–800 MB idle RAM with a few agents running. The mobile app needs the desktop running. Mobile is a companion that pairs with your desktop session over LAN or Stably's relay. Closed laptop = dark phone. N parallel agents = N parallel rate-limit hits. Running Claude Code three times in parallel uses 3x your Anthropic quota. The usage tracker shows it clearly, but new users get caught by surprise. Linux is AppImage only. No .deb / .rpm /Snap/Flatpak yet. AppImage works everywhere but lacks native polish. SSH worktrees require your remote box to be Orca-aware. Not "any SSH server" — Orca installs a small agent on the remote box. One command, documented, but worth noting for locked-down corporate boxes. The growth pattern 7.7K stars, 1.9K this week, daily release cadence on the releases page https://github.com/stablyai/orca/releases and active Discord point to real product-market fit among the "I run multiple coding agents" crowd. The Stably team triages feature requests on Discord within a day. Practical observations from the issue tracker: | Capability | Orca | Cursor | Windsurf | VS Code + extensions | Plain tmux | |---|---|---|---|---|---| Run any CLI agent | ✅ 30+ | ❌ Cursor only | ❌ Codeium only | ✅ if you script it | ✅ if you script it | Parallel worktrees / agents | ✅ first-class | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | manual | Mobile companion | ✅ iOS + Android | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | SSH remote agents | ✅ first-class | ✅ Remote-SSH | ⚠️ partial | ✅ Remote-SSH | ✅ | Design Mode click → context | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Account / rate-limit tracking | ✅ Claude + Codex | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Open source | ✅ Apache 2.0 | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ MIT | ✅ | Cost | Free + your agents | $20+/mo + agents | $15+/mo + agents | Free | Free | The honest read: Cursor and Windsurf are tightly integrated single-agent products with their own AI offerings baked in. They win if you want one polished agent and don't care about parallelism. Orca wins the moment you want two agents, mobile notifications, or vendor-neutral choice — and its bring-your-own-subscription model means you're not paying twice. macOS Homebrew brew install --cask stablyai/orca/orca macOS Apple Silicon, direct DMG open https://github.com/stablyai/orca/releases/latest/download/orca-macos-arm64.dmg Windows start https://github.com/stablyai/orca/releases/latest/download/orca-windows-setup.exe Linux AppImage wget https://github.com/stablyai/orca/releases/latest/download/orca-linux.AppImage chmod +x orca-linux.AppImage ./orca-linux.AppImage Arch AUR yay -S stably-orca-bin First launch walks you through agent detection — it scans $PATH for installed CLIs and pre-populates the agent list. Add your Claude Code / Codex / Cursor accounts via the account switcher, then create your first worktree. Not directly. Cursor and Windsurf are opinionated single-agent IDEs with their own AI baked in. Orca is the layer above those — it runs Claude Code, Codex, Cursor CLI, and 27 other CLI agents in parallel worktrees. If you only use one agent and like its UI, stay there. If you switch between agents or want parallelism, Orca is the orchestrator. No. Orca itself is free and Apache 2.0. You pay for the agents you choose to run Claude Code via Anthropic, Codex via OpenAI, Cursor CLI via Cursor . The bring-your-own-subscription model means Orca doesn't add a markup or middle-layer billing. No. The iOS app is free on the App Store; the Android APK is free on GitHub releases. The companion app requires you to pair with a desktop Orca instance — there's no cloud-only "mobile-first" mode. Yes. The account switcher / usage tracker shows live consumption per provider, but the math is what you'd expect: three parallel Claude Code agents = 3x token spend. Many users mitigate this by running cheaper models Haiku, GPT-5.5 Instant in parallel and reserving Opus / Codex-Maxxing for the merge agent. Partially. The Orca CLI orca worktree create , etc. works headlessly. The desktop UI requires a display. The common pattern is desktop Orca on your laptop + SSH worktree pointing at a headless Linux build box. It uses the live DOM of the embedded Chromium window, so React, Vue, Svelte, and SolidJS all work — you click the rendered element, you get the live HTML and computed CSS regardless of how it was generated. The cropped screenshot is captured from the rendered Chromium frame, not the source. No. Orca is a local desktop app; your code lives in your local git worktrees and your local agent runs. The mobile companion pairs over your local network when possible, with optional encrypted relay through Stably's servers when you're on different networks off by default — explicit opt-in . Orca is the first agent IDE that takes "multiple agents in parallel" seriously as the default workflow rather than an advanced feature. The combination of worktree fanout, mobile companion, SSH agents, and Design Mode is exactly the toolkit a developer running Claude Code + Codex + Cursor every day has been hand-rolling badly in tmux. If you're already paying Cursor or Windsurf and use one agent, stay there. If you've started writing your own scripts to coordinate three agents and a project board — uninstall those scripts and try Orca for a week. The bring-your-own-subscription model and Apache 2.0 license make the downside negligible. Pair it with Agent Reach https://dev.to/posts/agent-reach-ai-agent-internet-cli-review/ for free internet access inside agents and Voicebox https://dev.to/posts/voicebox-open-source-ai-voice-studio-review/ for voice I/O, and the open-source agent-developer stack starts to look complete. Download Orca: github.com/stablyai/orca https://github.com/stablyai/orca · onorca.dev https://onorca.dev