barrel

A CLI for AI-assisted development. Portable agents across LLMs. Reproducible terminal workspaces.

The Problem

Vibe coding is here. LLMs are racing to top benchmarks with infinite funding behind them. You want to switch when one pulls ahead—but your agents are stuck in .claude/ or .codex/.

Not using agents? You're leaving most of the LLM potential on the table. Copy-pasting them between tools? They drift out of sync.

Meanwhile, your terminal is chaos and your IDE crashes and keep losing context.

barrel fixes both and going beyond.

Features

Agent Portability

Write your agents once. barrel symlinks them wherever they need to go.

agents/
  code-reviewer.md
  frontend-engineer.md
  security-auditor.md

Switch LLMs by changing one line. No more copy-pasting between .claude/agents/ and .codex/agents/.

Reproducible Workspaces

One command. Your entire workspace materializes.

# barrel.yaml
workspace: myproject

shells:
  - type: claude
    agents: ["*"]
  - type: shell
    path: ./backend
  - type: shell
    path: ./frontend

terminal:
  profiles:
    default:
      type: tmux
      claude:
        col: 0
        row: 0
      backend:
        col: 1
        row: 0
      frontend:
        col: 1
        row: 1

barrel

Claude on the left, servers on the right. Close everything, come back tomorrow, run barrel again—exactly where you left off.

Installation

curl -sL https://install.barrel.rs | bash

Or build from source:

cargo barrel-install

Prerequisites

• tmux for workspace management
• One or more AI coding assistants

Supported LLMs

Agents can be dispatched to any of the following LLM:

• Claude Code - Anthropic
• Codex - OpenAI
• OpenCode - Open source
• Antigravity - Google

Quick Start

See the full Quick Start guide for detailed instructions.

# Initialize a workspace in current directory
barrel init

# Import your existing agents
barrel agent import ./.claude/agents/web-developer.md
barrel agent import ./agents/

# Launch a single AI shell (agents are symlinked automatically)
barrel claude

# Or launch the full workspace
barrel

Note: barrel bootstrap exists to auto-discover agents across your machine, but it's experimental. We recommend manually importing agents with barrel agent import <file|dir> for more control.

Usage

# Daily workflow
barrel                          # Launch workspace from barrel.yaml
barrel -w feat/auth             # Launch in a git worktree
barrel -k                       # Kill session and clean up

# Sessions
barrel session list             # List running sessions
barrel session join <name>      # Attach to a session
barrel session kill <name>      # Kill a session

# Agents
barrel agent list               # List all agents
barrel agent import <path>      # Import from file or directory
barrel agent new                # Create a new agent
barrel agent fork <name>        # Copy global agent locally
barrel agent link <name>        # Symlink global agent locally

See the CLI Reference for all options.

Configuration

Shells

Define what runs in each pane:

shells:
  # AI assistants
  - type: claude
    agents: ["code-reviewer", "frontend-engineer"]
    model: claude-sonnet-4-20250514

  - type: codex
    agents: ["*"]  # All agents

  - type: antigravity
    agents: ["*"]

  # Custom commands
  - type: shell
    path: ./backend
    command: npm run dev

  - type: shell
    path: ./frontend
    command: pnpm dev

Profiles

Define terminal layouts:

terminal:
  profiles:
    default:
      type: tmux  # tmux, tmux_cc (iTerm2), or shell
      claude:
        col: 0
        row: 0
      backend:
        col: 1
        row: 0
        height: 50
      frontend:
        col: 1
        row: 1

Agents

Centralize your agents:

agents:
  - path: ./agents           # Local agents
  - path: ~/.config/barrel/agents  # Global agents

For Developers Who

• Run multiple AI coding assistants and are tired of maintaining separate configs
• Work across several repositories that need to be running simultaneously
• Want reproducible dev environments they can spin up instantly
• Believe their tooling should adapt to them, not the other way around

Links

• Website
• Documentation

License

MIT