StaffordAI

Stafford

Stafford is a local desktop app that turns Claude Code into a team you manage instead of a terminal you use.

You hire agents. Each one takes a role from a definition file and gets a generated name you cannot change, because you do not choose the name of someone you hire. They persist across sessions with their history intact. You open the app and see a roster of cards, one per hire, showing who is working, who is idle, and who is waiting on you. Clicking a card gives you that agent's live terminal and a box to type into, which is the CLI you already know, addressed to a specific person.

I named it after Stafford Beer, the cybernetician. The name carries weight: this is a variety management system for agents, not a task tracker.

The axis

Vibe Kanban is task-centric. The Claude Desktop app is session-centric. Stafford is people-centric. You talk to a colleague, and the board is a view on top of that rather than the point of it.

Status

Pre-release. The core works and I use it, but there is no signed installer yet, so you run it from an unsigned build (see Install below).

What works today:

• Hire an agent, spawn its session, and watch it in a live terminal.
• Message a colleague, and see the reply in the same window.
• A roster with one card per hire, deriving working, idle, waiting, rate limited, and crashed from Claude Code's own hooks.
• A channel: one timeline across every colleague, with an inline reply on the row.
• Clean drain on quit, so no session is left half torn down.

What is not done yet: code signing, installers, and auto-update. That is the release work in progress now, and it is why the current build is unsigned.

Platforms

v0.1.0 is Windows only. Windows is my daily platform and the one I verify on, so it ships first. macOS is written and builds, but I develop on Windows and verifying macOS means switching machines, so I am not gating the first release on it. It comes in a later release. Linux is written but unsupported,