# Why we built Pilothouse: One inbox and PreToolUse rules for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and Grok Build > Source: > Published: 2026-11-02 16:41:43+00:00 *Originally published at [pilothouse.dev/blog/why-we-built-pilothouse](https://pilothouse.dev/blog/why-we-built-pilothouse).* **Update (October 26, 2026):** Pilothouse 0.2 adds OpenCode and Grok Build support, questions and plan approval from your phone, replies, activity and usage tracking, and two-way Telegram. If you run coding agents seriously, your day probably looks like this: three or four Claude Code sessions in different repos, a Codex session reviewing a PR, maybe an OpenCode or Grok Build session running in another tab or on a server over SSH. Each of them will, at some unpredictable moment, stop and wait for you. Sometimes you’re right there. Often you’re in another tab, in a meeting, making coffee, or asleep — and the agent sits idle for an hour because it wanted to run `npm install`. [Pilothouse](https://pilothouse.dev) exists to fix that, without making the rest of your setup worse. **Blocked prompts you don’t see.** Agents tell you they need you in the terminal they run in. If that terminal is behind three other windows, you find out when you go looking. **Every vendor solves it for itself.** Claude Code has Remote Control and push notifications. Codex has the ChatGPT apps. They’re good — for their own agent. If you use more than one agent, you have multiple inboxes, multiple apps, and separate sets of rules, and none of them know about the others. **Permission prompts are the wrong place for rules.** We wanted “never force-push” and “ask me before anything touches `main`” to hold for every agent. But a tool that only sees permission prompts can’t enforce that: if the agent’s settings already allow `git push`, it never asks, so there is nothing to intercept. **Most tools want you to move in.** A lot of the tooling around agents is a new terminal, a new multiplexer, or a new desktop app you have to run your agents inside. Some of them are excellent. But we already have terminals we like, and `tmux` or `herdr` sessions on servers that aren’t going anywhere. Why the name? A pilothouse is the enclosed room on a ship’s bridge where the ship is steered from. Your agents are the crew; you steer every one of them from one place — at the desk or from your phone. Pilothouse is a single Go binary that runs a small daemon per machine: `tmux`, or `herdr`.` PreToolUse` policy engine.`command.matches("(--force|-f)\\b")`). Any `deny` wins, then `ask`, then `allow`. A repo can ship its own `.pilothouse/policy.yaml`, but until you trust it, it can only make things stricter. **Hooks over pixels.** Reading the bottom of a terminal and guessing what an agent is doing works surprisingly often and fails in surprising ways. Hooks give us the exact tool call, the exact command, and a synchronous way to say yes or no. When a session’s state looks wrong, `pilothouse explain` shows the evidence behind it instead of shrugging. **Two checkpoints.** Policy runs on every `PreToolUse` and never waits for a person, so it’s fast. People are only asked when the agent would ask anyway — or when a rule says `ask`. **Don’t freeze the terminal.** The naive version of “approve from your phone” holds every prompt for the phone, which makes the terminal worse for the person sitting at it. Presence routing is the fix: only hold when you’re actually away. **Fail open, by default.** If Pilothouse crashes, your agents carry on as if it weren’t installed. If you’d rather they stop, set `approvals.fail_closed: true`. **Be honest about limits.** An agent runs as you. Pilothouse makes it hard for an agent to approve its own request — socket-only local decisions, a process-ancestry check, signed remote decisions, and a built-in rule that asks before an agent touches Pilothouse — but it is defense in depth, not a sandbox. Want to see the real web app with pretend agents asking for approvals in a temporary folder before touching your setup? ``` curl -fsSL https://pilothouse.dev/install.sh | sh pilothouse demo ``` Or install via Homebrew / shell and wire up your agents in under five minutes: ``` brew install pilothouse-dev/tap/pilothouse pilothouse setup ``` Pilothouse is free and open source under Apache-2.0: [https://pilothouse.dev](https://pilothouse.dev)