What is Orbit

Orbit is a desktop command center for solo developers who build with AI coding agents. It is the single window for everything that isn’t writing code: orchestrating prompts, watching what your agent is doing, planning with Apollo, generating images, running dev servers, querying databases, managing secrets, watching deploys, and keeping every project’s context in one place. Your code editor still edits code. Orbit handles everything around it.

It started as a file watcher. The problem was small and specific: the AI you plan with had no idea what the AI you build with had already finished. Every new planning session meant pasting completion logs and re-explaining project state. That watcher grew into a multi-project monitoring platform, and then into the mission control described here.

The two access points

Orbit is one product you reach through two access points that share a single server and a single source of truth.

The desktop app is where most work happens. It is an Electron window holding the pipeline of prompts across all your projects, Apollo, Image Studio, the Vault, per-project windows, and every settings panel. Apollo is Orbit’s unified chat, planning, and co-pilot surface: it knows your projects live, helps shape prompts, and can run real Orbit operations on confirmation. The app runs even when its background server is off — the server is an optional sidecar, not a parent process.

The mobile PWA is the same system served over a secure tunnel to your phone. Browse projects, watch the live queue, approve or cancel prompts, chat with Apollo by voice, attach a screenshot, and ship a fix — all without opening your laptop.

Underneath both is the Orbit server: an Express + MCP server with a SQLite prompt queue, a coding-agent process manager, and file watchers. It exposes an MCP endpoint so any AI chat — including Claude — can read your live project state and queue work.

The model at a glance

Everything in Orbit is built from a small set of ideas. You don’t need all of them to start.

Project — a registered folder Orbit watches. It carries a status, a progress bar, a completion log, and its own context files.
Prompt — a single numbered unit of work for a coding agent. Prompts carry a complexity: tag that routes them to a model tier, and they wait in a queue until you approve them.
The Queue — a per-project SQLite-backed line of prompts. One runs at a time; the rest wait, staged or pre-approved.
Complexity tier — Low / Medium / High and beyond, each mapped to an agent and model in your settings. The tag on a prompt decides which agent runs it.
Apollo — the always-available chat, planning, and co-pilot surface that knows your projects live and can execute real Orbit operations on confirmation.
Sandbox — an isolated git worktree where a prompt can run without touching your main branch, then be promoted or discarded.
MCP tools — the set of operations Orbit exposes to any AI client: read status, queue a prompt, fetch context, run git, and dozens more.

Who it’s for

Orbit is designed to serve two people equally well.

The developer who started this week installs it, drags a project folder onto the window, and immediately sees their agent’s session status. One click starts a dev server. One click opens a chat with full project context. They never touch a config file or learn what MCP stands for.

The veteran running fifteen projects across multiple clients uses the same window to manage custom server configs, query production databases, rotate API keys, trigger deploys, orchestrate parallel builds across git worktrees, and monitor production health. Power features surface as they’re needed, never cluttering the beginner’s view.

The throughline is simple: everything has a click-path and a power-user shortcut, and the interface reveals complexity only when you reach for it.

What makes it different

Standalone desktop app that works offline — the server is optional; the UI always loads.
Model-agnostic — works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Aider, or any agent that reads files, plus local and custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
Mobile-first orchestration — find a bug on your phone and your agent is fixing it in under a minute.
Multi-node — run Orbit on several machines and drive them all from one account.
Project-aware Apollo — full context injection without copy-pasting handoff documents.
Convention-aware prompts — your project name, your prompt number, your failure conditions, drafted automatically.

License

Orbit is distributed under the Business Source License 1.1 (licensor: Sivants LLC), with a four-year change date and conversion to Apache 2.0. The additional use grant permits personal and commercial development workflows. Offering Orbit as a hosted service to third parties is not permitted under the current terms. The Capture SDK is open source.