OmniWork

A free, local, Claude Code–style coding agent — with a whole AI gateway baked in.

Download it, open a folder, and start building. No API key. No login. No config. Free models work the second you launch — and you can run a whole team of agents at once.

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Why OmniWork

Every other AI coding tool makes you bring an API key, sign in, or pay per token. OmniWork doesn't. It bundles OmniRoute — a local AI gateway fronting 278+ providers (90+ free) — as an in-app sidecar. On launch it starts the gateway, points its agent at it, and you're coding with zero setup.

Then it goes further than a single chat agent: run many agents in parallel, let one agent fan work out to subagents, plug in MCP tools, and even use OmniWork as a token-saving delegate inside Claude Code or Codex.

Features

🆓 Free & keyless	Free models via auto routing, out of the box. Never rate-limited (auto-fallback across providers).
🖥️ Claude Code UI	A clean terminal: ⏺/⎿ tool calls, ✻ thinking, > prompt, @-file mentions, per-turn time + token counts.
📁 Projects & memory	Sessions live under projects. Durable MEMORY.md per project plus a global scope — it remembers what you teach it.
🎓 Skills	Claude Code–compatible SKILL.md packs, loaded on demand. Ships with Anthropic's public set; the agent can write and install more.
🛡️ Approval modes	Shift+Tab through auto · ask · edits · plan. Plan mode is read-only, blocked at the tool layer.
🤝 Cowork	Spawn many agent sessions and run them in parallel, each with its own folder + task.
🃏 Agent Deck	One agent fans work out to parallel subagents — watch them live as a deck of cards.
🌐 Browsing built in	web_search + browse_page render in a real Chromium window — JavaScript pages work, no API key.
🔌 MCP connections	Plug in tools (filesystem, GitHub, Postgres, Slack…) via any stdio MCP server. Add from the UI.
🪙 Delegate tool	OmniWork is also an MCP server — let Claude Code / Codex offload grunt work to its free models.
🔗 ACP agent	Speaks Agent Client Protocol, so OpenClaw / acpx / Zed can drive OmniWork as a full coding agent.
✂️ Select to quote	Highlighting output copies it instantly; a pill (or ⌘L) quotes it into the prompt as > lines.
📋 Collapsed pastes	Paste 300 lines and the prompt shows [Pasted text #1 +322 lines] — the model still gets all of it.
🔒 100% local	Everything runs on your machine. The gateway never phones home.
🧩 MIT, hackable	Plain CommonJS, no build step for the UI. Fork it, ship it, sell it.

Download

macOS (Apple Silicon) — Homebrew:

brew install --cask --no-quarantine VedSoni-dev/tap/omniwork

(--no-quarantine skips the Gatekeeper prompt for the unsigned app; omit it if you'd rather right-click → Open once.)

Or grab an installer from the latest release:

Platform	File	Size	Notes
macOS (Apple Silicon)	OmniWork-<ver>-arm64.dmg	~684 MB	Engine bundled. Unsigned — see below
Windows (full)	OmniWork.Setup.<ver>.exe	~318 MB	Engine bundled — usable instantly
Windows (lite)	OmniWork-Lite-Setup-<ver>.exe	~136 MB	Downloads the engine on first run (~1–3 min, once)
macOS (Intel) · Linux	—	—	Build from source

Open it, pick a folder, type a task. First launch takes ~30–60 s (one-time database setup), and is fast afterwards.

First launch on macOS

The .dmg is not code-signed or notarized, so macOS blocks it the first time. To run it:

1. Drag OmniWork to Applications
2. Right-click the app → Open, then confirm

Double-clicking instead shows "OmniWork is damaged and can't be opened" — the app is fine, that's just Gatekeeper's message for unsigned apps. If it still refuses:

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

Use OmniWork inside Claude Code / Codex — token saver 🪙

Don't want to fully switch? Keep your premium agent as the orchestrator and let it delegate the token-heavy grunt work to OmniWork's free models. OmniWork ships an MCP server exposing two tools:

• delegate(task, cwd?) — OmniWork does the subtask autonomously on free models and returns a summary + changes
• delegate_parallel(tasks[], cwd?) — fan a batch out to parallel free-model subagents

Your expensive model spends tokens on the hard reasoning; OmniWork burns free tokens on the mechanical work, in the same project folder.

Set it up in one command

npm run connect

This registers the MCP server for your user and adds a short section to your global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md explaining when delegating is worth it. It shows you exactly what it will change and asks first — both files are global and affect every Claude Code session, so nothing happens silently. Re-running it updates in place rather than duplicating, and it leaves a .omniwork-backup beside anything it edits.

Undo it completely at any time:

npm run connect -- --uninstall

Then restart Claude Code and ask: "delegate writing the tests to omniwork."

Manual setup, or another MCP client

OmniWork speaks standard MCP over stdio, so it works with Codex, Cursor, or anything else that supports it. Add to .mcp.json (or run claude mcp add):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "omniwork": { "command": "node", "args": ["/absolute/path/to/omniwork/electron/mcp-server.js"] }
  }
}

Keep the desktop app running and delegated calls reuse its warm gateway; otherwise the first call boots one, which takes longer.

When delegating is actually worth it

Delegation is not free — there's ~25–30 s of overhead per call, and the delegated agent starts cold, with no view of your conversation. It pays for bulk mechanical work, independent chunks you can fan out with delegate_parallel, and read-heavy research you want kept out of context. It does not pay for small edits, work that needs conversation context, or anything where precision matters — free models drift on instruction details.

Treat the returned summary as a claim, not evidence, and verify before calling the work done. npm run connect installs this guidance so your agent applies it automatically.

Drive OmniWork from OpenClaw, Zed, or any ACP harness 🔌

The MCP server makes OmniWork a tool your agent calls. The ACP server makes it a full coding agent that another harness drives — OpenClaw, acpx, Zed, Neovim, anything that speaks the Agent Client Protocol. The harness owns the UI, the approval prompts, and the transcript; OmniWork does the work on free models.

// ~/.acpx/config.json  or  <repo>/.acpxrc.json
{ "agents": { "omniwork": { "argv": ["npx", "-y", "omniwork-acp"] } } }

// openclaw.json
{ "plugins": { "entries": { "acpx": { "enabled": true, "config": {
  "agents": { "omniwork": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "omniwork-acp"] } }
} } } } }

Then acpx omniwork "fix the flaky test", or spawn it as an OpenClaw subagent.

What the harness gets:

Streaming output	Text, reasoning, and per-tool status as they happen
Native diffs	write_file / edit_file arrive as ACP diffs, not "wrote 412 bytes"
Permission prompts	Every gated tool call becomes session/request_permission — "allow always" flips the session to auto
The Agent Deck	spawn_subagents shows up as N live parallel tool calls, not one opaque block
Skills as slash commands	Installed skills are published via available_commands_update
Modes	ask (default), edits, auto, plan — switch with acpx omniwork set-mode plan
Resumable sessions	session/load replays the transcript, so a crashed harness picks up where it left off

Modes default to ask because ACP's whole point is that the client owns the permission boundary. Set OMNIWORK_ACP_MODE=auto if you'd rather it run unattended.

By default OmniWork runs on its own bundled OmniRoute gateway (free models). To spend a different provider's budget instead, point it elsewhere — OMNIWORK_BASE_URL, OMNIWORK_API_KEY, and OMNIWORK_MODEL apply to both the ACP and MCP servers.

Build from source

Requires Node.js 22+ (24 recommended).

git clone https://github.com/VedSoni-dev/omniwork.git
cd omniwork
npm install --legacy-peer-deps   # OmniRoute has a benign marked peer conflict
npm run setup                    # verify/repair setup, then offer Claude Code integration
npm start                        # launch the app

npm run setup runs doctor and then offers to connect OmniWork to Claude Code. Use npm run doctor alone to skip the integration prompt, or npm run setup -- --no-connect.

npm run doctor is worth running whenever something looks broken. It checks your Node version, the OmniRoute engine and the app icon — and it repairs the most common failure, a half-extracted Electron binary ("Electron failed to install correctly"), which happens when the ~100 MB postinstall download is interrupted or when npm defers install scripts. It re-extracts from the cached download instead of making you reinstall.

Packaging installers

npm run dist:mac     # or dist:win / dist:linux  →  output in dist/

Build on the matching OS. Architecture is handled for you: the gateway's Node runtime is downloaded from nodejs.org for the target arch, so an Apple Silicon Mac can produce a working x64 build. The one caveat is native modules — better-sqlite3 is compiled for the build host, so a cross-arch build falls back to OmniRoute's WASM (sql.js) store, which works but is slower. For release-quality artifacts, build each architecture on its own runner (see .github/workflows/release.yml).

Locally built .apps are unsigned — same right-click → Open dance as above.

How it works

┌─ OmniWork (Electron) ─────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Terminal UI  ·  Cowork rail  ·  Agent Deck               │
│      │ IPC                                                │
│  Main process                                             │
│    ├─ SessionManager → N parallel agents                  │
│    │      └─ each agent: tools + MCP + subagents          │
│    └─ spawns OmniRoute sidecar (bundled Node)             │
│           localhost:20128  ◄── free models, no key        │
└───────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┘
                            │
              OmniRoute ──► 278+ providers (free tier default)

  mcp-server.js  ──►  Claude Code / Codex delegate here
  acp-server.js  ──►  OpenClaw / acpx / Zed drive OmniWork here

• On boot, electron/sidecar.js runs OmniRoute's prebuilt server on a bundled Node runtime (Electron's own Node can't boot it) and health-checks localhost:20128/v1. If a healthy gateway is already on the port, it adopts that one instead of starting a second.
• electron/agent.js runs an OpenAI-compatible tool-use loop; spawn_subagents fans out; MCP tools merge in namespaced as mcp__<server>__<tool>.
• electron/sessions.js runs many agents in parallel; electron/mcp.js is the MCP client; electron/mcp-server.js exposes OmniWork as an MCP server (the delegate tool), and electron/acp-server.js exposes it as an ACP agent. Both are headless stdio servers sharing electron/headless.js for gateway, skills, and memory wiring.
• Agent file tools are confined to the workspace folder you pick. See SECURITY.md for what that does and does not cover.

Configuration

Works with zero config. To go beyond the free tier, click router dashboard in the app to add provider keys (stored encrypted, locally), or pick a specific model in the status bar.

Env	Default	Purpose
OMNIWORK_GATEWAY_PORT	20128	Gateway port
OMNIWORK_WORKSPACE	—	Open a folder on launch
OMNIWORK_MODEL	auto	Pin a model (MCP + ACP servers)
OMNIWORK_BASE_URL	—	Run headless servers against another OpenAI-compatible endpoint
OMNIWORK_API_KEY	omniwork	Key for OMNIWORK_BASE_URL
OMNIWORK_ACP_MODE	ask	Starting approval mode for ACP sessions
OMNIWORK_DELEGATE_TIMEOUT_MS	600000	Backstop before a stalled delegate returns partial work
OMNIWORK_NODE	—	Node binary used to run the gateway in dev
OMNIWORK_NODE_VERSION	build host's	Node version staged into packaged builds
OMNIWORK_DEV	—	Devtools + verbose logs

Project layout

electron/
  main.js         app lifecycle, windows, IPC
  sidecar.js      bundled OmniRoute process manager  ← the core idea
  shell-path.js   repairs PATH for GUI (Finder/Dock) launches
  engine-fetch.js downloads the engine on first run (lite builds)
  sessions.js     Cowork: parallel agent sessions
  agent.js        tool-use loop + subagent fan-out (Agent Deck)
  tools.js        file/shell/web tools (workspace-confined)
  mcp.js          MCP client (connect external tool servers)
  mcp-server.js   MCP server (delegate tool for Claude Code / Codex)
  acp-server.js   ACP agent (OpenClaw / acpx / Zed drive OmniWork)
  headless.js     shared bootstrap for both stdio servers
  preload.js      contextIsolation-safe IPC bridge
renderer/         the terminal UI (index.html, styles.css, app.js)
scripts/
  stage-node.js   fetches the gateway's Node runtime at package time
  setup.js        doctor + optional Claude Code integration
  connect.js      registers the MCP server and installs delegate guidance
  doctor.js       setup verification + repair
  gen-icon.js     dependency-free app-icon generator
test/             boot · smoke · cowork · features · persist · mcp · acp · sidecar

Documentation

• CHANGELOG.md — what shipped, when
• ROADMAP.md — what's next, and what is explicitly not planned
• CONTRIBUTING.md — dev setup, architecture notes, how to send a PR
• SECURITY.md — the agent's trust model and how to report a vulnerability

Contributing

PRs welcome — this is meant to be a clean, hackable base. Open areas:

• Code-signing + notarization so macOS and Windows builds install without warnings
• Intel macOS and Linux release artifacts (needs CI runners; see release.yml)
• Git checkpoints — commit before each agent turn so any change is revertable
• Cross-arch native modules so better-sqlite3 doesn't fall back to WASM
• Token/cost display in the status bar

See CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.

Credits

UX inspired by Claude Code and the open-source OpenWork. Routing powered by OmniRoute.

License

MIT © OmniWork contributors. OmniRoute is MIT © its authors.