If you've been running AI coding agents like Claude Code, Gemini CLI, or Codex CLI for any serious work, you know the pain: sessions stall waiting for approvals, crashed workers go unnoticed, and coordinating multiple agents means bouncing between windows until your sanity frays. Swarm, a new open-source project from developer miopea, aims to fix that with a web-based control center that turns your browser into a mission control room.
The Core Idea
Swarm runs every agent session in a managed PTY (pseudo-terminal) and gives you a real-time dashboard to monitor all of them simultaneously. You can read terminal output, type directly into any worker's session via an interactive WebSocket attach, create and assign tasks from a drag-and-drop board, and let background 'drones' handle the routine decisions that would otherwise stall your agents. The whole system is operator-gated—nothing executes without your approval—but once configured, you spend time reviewing results instead of babysitting processes.
Drones: Your Autopilot Workers
The real magic in Swarm isn't the dashboard—it's the drone system. These specialized background watchers run at their own cadences and handle the grunt work that would normally interrupt human attention. IdleWatcher nudges resting workers with assigned tasks and recovers sessions whose MCP tools dropped. PressureManager monitors system memory and swap, suspending or resuming workers based on host-level pressure. ContextPressure watches per-worker context percentages and injects /compact when conversations get bloated. And Verifier runs adversarial post-completion checks after every task—deterministic gates first (empty diff? no /check evidence?), then LLM calls if needed—to catch sloppy work before it reaches you.
The Queen Conductor
Above the drones sits the Queen—a headless Claude conductor that watches the hive and proposes actions. There are actually two Queens by design: an interactive one (a full Claude Code PTY for conversational coordination with the operator) and a headless one (stateless claude -p subprocesses for high-volume drone-driven calls). The Queen assigns tasks to workers based on project descriptions, detects completion by monitoring commit signals and test results, drafts email replies for tasks that originated from Outlook, and escalates stuck worker situations. Every Queen action surfaces as a proposal in the dashboard with a confidence score—you approve or reject with one click before anything executes.
Task System and Skill Workflows
Tasks flow through skill-based pipelines mapped to Claude Code slash commands. Bug reports dispatch /fix-and-ship (trace root cause → TDD fix → minimal patch → commit & push), features run /feature, and verification tasks pull latest code, run tests, and report pass/fail. Each worker auto-installs Swarm-specific slash commands—/swarm-status, /swarm-handoff, /swarm-finding, /swarm-warning, /swarm-blocker—so the coordination tools show up cleanly in agent transcripts. Tasks with dependencies block until all prerequisites complete, and failed tasks can be reopened or reassigned without losing their audit trail.
Getting Started
Installation is refreshingly simple: uv tool install git+https://github.com/miopea/swarm.git. The setup wizard installs Claude Code hooks (auto-approving safe Read/Edit/Write/Glob/Grep operations), generates your config by scanning ~/projects for repos, sets up a background service for auto-start on boot, and optionally protects the dashboard with an API password. On Linux/WSL it uses systemd; macOS gets launchd. The dashboard runs at http://localhost:9090 immediately after init, and you can install it as a PWA for native-app experience with offline support.
Integrations and API
Swarm connects to Outlook via OAuth for email-to-task creation (drag .eml/.msg files onto the board) and draft reply generation. Jira Cloud syncs two-way via OAuth 2.0—import/export tasks, create issues directly from the dashboard. The REST API exposes 80+ endpoints with OpenAPI docs at /api/docs/ui, and a full SQLite database (~/.swarm/swarm.db) persists tasks, proposals, messages, pipelines, skills, and history. Cloudflare Tunnel support enables remote access to the dashboard from phones or other machines.
Key Takeaways
- Swarm unifies Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Codex CLI under one real-time web dashboard with WebSocket PTY attach
- Background drones auto-approve safe operations, recover crashed sessions, and manage context pressure—no more stalled agents
- The Queen conductor (headless + interactive) assigns tasks, detects completion, and drafts emails—operator approval required for everything
- Task system maps to Claude Code skill commands (/fix-and-ship, /feature, /verify), with dependency tracking and full audit history
- Installation is a single uv command; dashboard auto-starts on boot via systemd or launchd