Open source

The engine that runs on your computer is public, MIT licensed, and on PyPI.

What is open

aaw-core is everything that runs on your computer:

  • The daemon that watches each agent in its tmux session and turns what happens there into the feed on your phone.
  • The hooks that Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Grok CLI, Cursor, and scoot call on every tool use, question, and finished turn.
  • The aaw command and the background service that keeps sessions bridged after you log out.
  • The relay server, the small program in the middle that carries encrypted messages between your computer and your phone. We run one for everyone, and you can run your own.
  • The encryption: AES-256-GCM with a key your computer and your phone exchange once, through the QR code you scan.

The Agents At Work Mac app runs this same engine, and our hosted relay runs this same relay. You can read exactly what touches your code and your agents.

Our own agent: scoot

scoot is the terminal coding agent we build ourselves, and it is open source too, under the same MIT license. You type what you want in plain language, and it reads, searches, edits, and runs things in your repo, asking before anything risky.

  • Free local models or your own keys. It runs a local model through Ollama at no cost, or talks to OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Groq with your own API key.
  • Plain Python, nothing else. It has no third-party dependencies, only the Python standard library (3.9 or newer).
  • Works with Agents At Work like the other agents. Start it from the phone or by typing scoot in a project folder, and follow and approve it from your phone.
pipx install scootcli

Source on GitHub, package on PyPI.

What is not

The phone apps (iPhone, iPad, Android) and the Mac menu bar app are not open source. The Mac app and the engine are free. The phone apps follow one computer on our hosted relay for free; the Personal and Pro plans raise that to 3 and 15 computers. Computers on a relay you run yourself never count toward a plan. Plans and prices →

Install it

On Linux, one command sets up everything, including the link with your phone:

curl -fsSL https://agentsatwork.app/install-linux.sh | bash

By hand, on Linux or macOS, with Python 3.11 or newer and tmux:

pipx install aaw-core
aaw link                  # choose a relay, then scan the QR code with the phone app
aaw service install       # keeps sessions bridged in the background
aaw shell-integration on  # typing claude, codex, ... in a folder starts a bridged session

On a Mac you can skip all of this: the Mac app installs and runs the engine for you. The manual install is for a Mac without the app, such as a Mac mini or a Mac server nobody sits at, or an older Mac the app does not support; the headless Mac setup covers it (use brew install pipx tmux first).

Run your own relay

The relay only ever sees ciphertext and routing information, but if you would rather not use ours, run the same server yourself with docker compose from the repository's relay/ folder, and point your computer at it with aaw link --relay wss://your.host/v1/ws.

One thing works differently on your own relay: waking the phone with a push notification needs the store apps' push credentials, so your phone gets updates while the app is open, not in the background.

Links