Bohay: Open-source mission control for AI coding agents

Bohay is a free, open-source terminal application (licensed under AGPL-3.0) designed to serve as a unified control center for AI coding agents. The tool can be installed via a shell script (`curl -fsSL https://bohay.dev/install.sh | sh`), Homebrew (`brew install RizRiyz/bohay/bohay`), Cargo, or on macOS through an alternative quarantine-free Homebrew cask installation. A live demo is available on the project website.

The core interface is built around a single terminal with a sidebar that displays the real-time status of every running agent—whether it is waiting for user input, actively working, finished, or idle. A key design detail is that an agent only registers as working when it is genuinely executing, so user typing or CLI startup sequences do not cause false busy signals. An optional retro chime alerts users when an agent finishes or needs input. Users can click any pane's title to see the full, unabbreviated command the agent is executing, inspect the files an agent has touched through a file tree (tinted by git status), and open those files in a built-in fast viewer or in an external editor like vim or nano. All session state—panes, tabs, and layout—persists across terminal closes; when the terminal reopens, every agent's chat history reloads automatically without requiring session flags or manual context restoration.

For teams of agents working on the same repository, Bohay provides an orchestration board where users can add tasks with dependencies. Each task gets an isolated git worktree and its own pane. Path leases prevent multiple agents from being assigned to edit the same files simultaneously. A quality gate (a user-defined test command) must pass before a task transitions to done, and finished branches merge through a dedicated worktree without touching the user's primary checkout. A built-in git tab lets users browse commits, branches, pull requests, and issues without leaving the terminal; pull requests can be opened or merged directly from Bohay. Remote sessions are supported over plain SSH, with no port forwarding required and responsive interactive feel.

On macOS 15+ with Apple silicon, users can install an optional native notch panel called bohay-notch (via `brew install --cask --no-quarantine RizRiyz/bohay/bohay-notch`), which mirrors every agent into the MacBook notch for unobtrusive monitoring and approval of agent requests without breaking focus. Bohay integrates with nine major AI agent platforms—Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Codex, opencode, Pi, Kimi, Amp, and Grok—as well as Qwen, Gemini, Aider, and Droid. A full matrix of platform compatibility, including session-resume capability and event-reporting support, is available on the project documentation. The code is fully open on GitHub, and the creators encourage users to file issues, read the implementation, or submit pull requests.

Bohay emerges as a response to a concrete friction point in AI-assisted development: as developers increasingly delegate coding tasks to multiple agents, the lack of unified visibility and coordination has become a bottleneck. The tool addresses this by collapsing the multi-window problem into a single terminal interface where status is always visible and trustworthy (an agent only counts as working when truly active, not when the user is typing or a CLI is starting). This design choice reflects a deeper principle: that coordination overhead should not grow with the number of agents in play.

The orchestration model—using git worktrees to isolate concurrent work and blocking merges until tests pass—is borrowed from mature team development practices but applied to agent-agent collaboration. By making session persistence automatic and file-change visibility immediate (through git status coloring and a live file viewer), Bohay lowers the cognitive load of context-switching between agents and human work. The support for remote sessions over SSH with zero port-forwarding setup removes another operational barrier, letting developers monitor and control agent work from any machine.

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