IDE is dead. Long live the ADE

Agentic Development Environment for the AI era

Warning

factorai is alpha. It is used daily by its author and by very few other people. Releases go out several times a day and publish themselves; things move, break and get renamed without ceremony. It drives real agent sessions against real repositories, so point it at work your version control can recover. What's next and what just landed.

You stopped writing most of the code. Your editor never noticed. It still opens files one at a time, still assumes the cursor is the thing that matters, still treats the terminal running your agent as a rectangle at the bottom of the screen.

factorai is built the other way round. The unit of work is a session, not a file — agents are long-lived processes you launch, watch, resume and kill, and reading code is something you do to check on the work.

---

Run agents, not chats

Every session is a real PTY with xterm.js in front of it — the actual claude CLI, not a reimplementation of it. Launch a new one, resume an old one, stop and restart it. Terminals survive navigation: leave a session, go read a file, come back, it is still running.

The dot beside each session says what it is doing — working, waiting for you, or stopped — read from Claude's own terminal title rather than guessed at, so "is it blocked on a permission prompt?" is answerable from the sidebar. Open sessions become tabs, and the tabs come back when you relaunch.

Put an agent on a schedule

A routine is a saved prompt with a cron behind it, kept per project: a nightly triage, a dependency sweep, a lint gate on the hour. When one comes due, factorai starts a session with that prompt as its first message — without opening a tab, so a project's scheduled work does not take the window away from what you are doing. Its dot is blue while it runs in the background, and opening it makes it an ordinary session with an ordinary tab.

Routines run while factorai is open, and a run missed while it was closed is caught up at launch.

Arrange the sidebar the way you think

Projects sit where you drag them, in groups you name — Pro, Perso, side projects. Drop one on a group to file it, on the edge to leave it beside, or hold it over another project to group the two. Alt+arrows and Move to group do the same from the keyboard, and Name or Recent sort when you would rather have a rule than an arrangement.

Find the conversation you half-remember

factorai reads ~/.claude/projects/ directly — projects, sessions, titles, turn counts, timestamps. Nothing is imported, copied or migrated; your transcripts stay exactly where the CLI put them, and that directory is treated as read-only.

On top of it sits SQLite FTS5 across every message in every session, so "which conversation was that?" takes a second rather than an afternoon of grep through JSONL.

Inspect what it did to your repo

A Changes panel with the usual git grouping — staged, unstaged, conflicts — line counts per file, and a diff on click. It polls, so it keeps up with an agent mid-edit.

A Graph tab for the history around what just happened: lanes, refs, and who wrote each commit. And a file tree with git decorations — changed files coloured, dirty folders dotted, ignored ones dimmed — in front of a Monaco viewer with syntax highlighting and rendered markdown.

---

Nothing leaves your machine. No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting. No account, no server, no sync — factorai reads local files and runs local processes, and it never handles your credentials: it drives the claude CLI you have already logged into.

No orphan agents, ever. Closing the window with live sessions always confirms, then kills every child (SIGTERM → SIGKILL). An unattended claude process is real money.

Install

Grab the .dmg (macOS) or .AppImage (Linux) from Releases. Both update themselves — factorai checks on launch and every six hours, stages the new version in the background, and shows Restart in the header when it is ready. Nothing restarts on its own, because a restart kills running sessions.

You also need the Claude Code CLI, already authenticated (claude login).

Two things that look like the app is broken, and aren't

macOS builds are unsigned. There is no Apple Developer certificate behind them, so Gatekeeper refuses the app on first launch with "damaged and can't be opened". Right-click the app → Open → Open, or clear the quarantine attribute yourself:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/factorai.app

Linux bundles need glibc 2.39 or newer — Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+, Fedora 40+. They are built on Ubuntu 24.04, and a glibc-linked binary does not run on an older release than the one that built it. On Ubuntu 22.04 you will see GLIBC_2.38 not found; build from source there instead.

There is no .deb, on purpose: Tauri's updater can replace an AppImage in place but never a .deb, since apt owns those files — and a package that silently never self-updates is worse than none.

Building from source, and everything else a contributor needs, is in CONTRIBUTING.md.

_{macOS and Linux. Windows is out of scope for v1.}