Middleman
www.middleman.tools- Category
- AI Agents
- Rank
- No. 1135Tools index
Previous survey · No. 1104 ·
- Pricing
- Open Source
- Platform
- cli · web
- Type
- TOOL
- Builder
- @SawyerHood
- GitHub
- 182 stars
- Date
About
A local-first AI agent orchestration platform that acts as a persistent project manager for your coding projects. It dispatches worker AI agents, tracks progress, handles merges, and manages the entire development workflow so you can focus on direction rather than task management.
What it does
Middleman gives each coding project a long-running manager you steer through chat. That manager learns workflow preferences, divides incoming work among coding agents, runs independent tasks concurrently, and routes their messages. A browser dashboard shows conversations, status, settings, and artifacts while a local daemon stores state and schedules work.
Why it's ranked here
The architecture addresses a genuine coordination problem with persistent context, explicit agent states, parallel workers, and isolated worktrees. Its dashboard and typed messaging make the system unusually inspectable. However, the project explicitly calls itself experimental, warns of breaking changes, and says a different tool is superseding it.
What's good
Managers remain available across sessions through compacted memory, reducing repeated project onboarding. Workers can use Codex, Claude, or Pi-backed runtimes, while status events expose busy, compacting, interrupted, stopped, and error states. SQLite persistence, recovery handling, checkpoints, and controlled shutdown show attention to long-running agent operations.
Tradeoffs
This is pre-release software described by its author as inspiration rather than a polished product. Constant changes can break established workflows. Running it requires Node 22 or newer, provider credentials, and comfort supervising autonomous coding agents. Its own documentation directs new users toward the successor project.
How to use it well
Use Middleman when several coding tasks can proceed independently and you want one conversational control point. Onboard the manager with repository context, tool preferences, review expectations, and sequencing rules before assigning batches. It suits experimentation or forking better than stability-sensitive production operations. It does not replace code review or provide a polished supported product.
Technical notes+
The pnpm workspace in package.json targets Node >=22 and includes apps/cli, apps/backend, apps/ui, apps/site, packages/protocol, and packages/swarmd. packages/swarmd/src/bootstrap.ts builds a SQLite-backed core around repositories, an event bus, runtime supervision, checkpoint updates, recovery, message capture, and shutdown. packages/swarmd/src/index.ts exports adapters for Codex, Claude, and Pi plus storage and event primitives. packages/protocol/src/client-commands.ts and packages/protocol/src/server-events.ts define the typed WebSocket command and event surfaces, while packages/protocol/src/attachments.ts supports image, text, and binary conversation attachments. packages/swarmd/vitest.config.ts configures Node-based Vitest and excludes worktrees.
Observed
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Primary language
- TypeScript
- Install surface
- Runnable from npm with npx middleman-app; source development uses pnpm workspaces
- Interfaces
- Browser dashboard, local HTTP and WebSocket daemon, and CLI workspace
- Runtime requirement
- Node.js 22 or newer
- Repository structure
- Monorepo with CLI, backend, UI, site, protocol, and orchestration workspaces
- Agent backends
- Codex, Claude, and Pi adapters are exported by the orchestration package
Read from README.md, package.json, packages/swarmd/vitest.config.ts, packages/swarmd/src/index.ts, packages/protocol/src/index.ts, packages/swarmd/src/version.ts, packages/swarmd/src/bootstrap.ts, packages/protocol/src/attachments.ts, packages/protocol/src/shared-types.ts, packages/protocol/src/server-events.ts, packages/protocol/src/client-commands.ts, packages/swarmd/src/core/store/index.ts, packages/swarmd/src/core/types/index.ts, packages/swarmd/src/runtime/pi/index.ts, packages/swarmd/src/core/events/index.ts.
What it can do
Create AI project managers
Project configuration and parameters → Configured AI manager instance for a coding project
Dispatch worker AI agents to handle coding tasks
Development tasks and project requirements → Task assignments distributed to AI worker agents
Track progress of multiple development tasks
Active AI agent tasks and their status updates → Real-time progress reports and task completion status
Execute multiple coding tasks in parallel
Queue of development tasks → Simultaneously processed coding work across multiple agents
Handle code merges automatically
Code changes from multiple AI worker agents → Merged codebase with resolved conflicts
Manage development workflow orchestration
Project workflow configuration and task dependencies → Coordinated execution of development pipeline stages
Run as persistent local daemon service
System startup and daemon configuration → Continuously running AI orchestration service
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Editorially curated, with community endorsements as a secondary signal. Corrections welcome.