crystl
crystl is a macOS terminal that runs parallel AI coding agents, each in its own isolated git worktree, with approvals pushed to your screen.
crystl is the most opinionated take on agent supervision I've seen on macOS: worktree isolation per shard, approvals that come to you as glass cards, and a terminal engine whose output other agents can parse. The free Apprentice tier is genuinely usable for a small fleet — isolated shards, floating cards, activity panel, history navigator, token tracking, Workbench and the project optimizer. Pay the $170/year Guild only when you hit orchestration, quest roundtables, unlimited scheduling, or
Verified 3d ago · liveness 78/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/crystl
- macOS developers running several CLI coding agents across multiple projects at once
- Power users supervising a fleet of parallel agents who want approvals pushed to them
- Teams that want agent workflows and API keys to stay local, with open models on their own hardware
- Developers running many Claude Code or Codex sessions for research or competitive work
- Windows and Linux users — crystl is macOS-only and Swift-native
- Occasional single-agent users who are fine with a plain terminal and manual git worktrees
- Buyers who need SSO, a cloud control plane, or centralized enterprise management
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Skip crystl if you are on Windows or Linux, run at most one coding agent at a time, or need SSO and a cloud control plane rather than a local-first macOS terminal.
Agent orchestration, custom heroes and agent parties, and full agent-callable CLI access are all locked to Guild at $170/year, so coordinating a team of agents costs more than the free tier suggests.
Apprentice is $0/forever and genuinely usable: isolated shards, floating approval cards, the activity panel, history navigator, token tracking, Workbench, MCP servers and Keychain key storage are all included. Guild at $170/year (about 21% off paying monthly) is the tier that matters if you run a fleet, because orchestration, sequence automation and unlimited scheduling live there. Compared with cloud agent control planes that bill per cloud task, crystl is a flat annual fee and your agent
In short
crystl — crystl is a macOS terminal that runs parallel AI coding agents, each in its own isolated git worktree, with approvals pushed to your screen. Best for macOS developers running several CLI coding agents across multiple projects at once, Power users supervising a fleet of parallel agents who want approvals pushed to them, Teams that want agent workflows and API keys to stay local, with open models on their own hardware. Free to start; paid plans from $170/yr.
What's new in crystl
Checked 2 days agoAcross the latest 5 updates: 4 changelog entries and 1 news mention.
crystl 2.247.0 — speaker sizing, shard naming, and clearer failure messages
Chat speaker names now match their message size, your own name is the app's blue everywhere, and a shard whose shell never came up reads 'no agent — its shell never came up' rather than restating that nothing is running.
crystl 2.246.0 — held-message cards and launch-failure reporting
Messages held for a shard now show a card with a clear-the-line button and a 'crystl dispatch cancel' command, and a failed agent launch reports 'no agent — launch did not start', wakes crystl wait blocked and reaches your phone.
crystl 2.245.0 — chat typography overhaul and abort fixes
Chat adopts your settings typeface at its own reading size, mixed prose and code spacing is evened out for dark glass, and crystl abort now clears a shard's input line to get a worker accepting input again.
Turns-left estimate corrected after compaction
Turns left now reads accurately after a compaction, where it previously ran about a third high, and holds its estimate on the turn the compaction lands on; shard model resolution is unified across the turns pill, roster, quest bars, hero card and bridge.
Meta-orchestration: the layer above your agent orchestrator
A crystl blog post distinguishing orchestration — one agent splitting work inside a project — from meta-orchestration: watching every project and routing work between them.
What people actually say about crystl — is it worth it?
We scanned public community sources for crystl on Jul 5, 2026 and could not establish that the discussion we found is about this tool rather than something else sharing its name. Our own analysis of that scan says the posts were off-subject. Rather than publish a sentiment score built on the wrong subject, we publish nothing here and re-run the scan.
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is crystl? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Run parallel AI coding agent sessions, each in its own isolated git worktree and branch
- Off-screen shards throttle to near-zero render work so a dozen agents stay light on the Mac
- Floating glass cards for approvals, questions, denials, and alerts, color-coded by gem
- Agent activity panel showing every agent across gems, who works for whom, and files touched
- Agent orchestration: summon a ruler or anoint an agent to coordinate workers (Guild)
- crystl quest: roundtable of role-played agents collaborating in one shared chat (Guild)
- Hero shards: summon a solo specialist with its own agent, model, and persona
- Agent scheduling on a timer, up to 3 shards free and unlimited on Guild
- Sequence automation: multi-stage pipelines on a schedule, file change, or poll (Guild)
- Token tracking with per-turn burn, turns-left estimates, and per-plugin cost breakdown
- Workbench: shared WORKBENCH.md task list the agent reads and writes alongside you
- Project optimizer: score any project for agent-readiness, ranked gaps, one-click fixes
- History navigator: searchable local database of every past session and tool call
- CAVRN terminal engine with GPU (Metal) rendering and agent-readable structured metadata
- Prompt library with 200+ prompts plus facet inserts for one-click prompts and commands
About crystl
crystl is a macOS terminal for developers who run several CLI coding agents at once. Every project you open is a gem, every session inside it a shard, and each shard gets its own git worktree and branch so parallel agents can work the same repo without stepping on each other. Off-screen shards throttle to near-zero render work, which is how crystl keeps a dozen agents from cooking your Mac. The part that separates it from a plain terminal is supervision. Approvals, questions, and alerts arrive as floating glass cards color-coded by gem instead of buried in scrollback, and the agent activity panel shows every agent across every project plus the files it touched. The CAVRN engine records each turn, tool call, result, and table as agent-readable metadata drawn on the GPU with Metal, so agents can read each other's sessions rather than merely be watched. A shared WORKBENCH.md task list is edited by you and the agent in the same file, and the project optimizer scores any repo for agent-readiness, names every gap, and offers one-click fixes. crystl also ships an iPhone app, now on the App Store, for approving access, answering questions, and spawning agents; it works free over Wi-Fi and over an encrypted relay from anywhere on Guild. Guild membership at $170/year (about 21% off paying monthly) adds the coordination layer: anoint an orchestrator to manage subagents, run crystl quest roundtables of role-played agents in one shared chat, sequence automation for multi-stage pipelines triggered by schedule, file change, or poll, full agent-callable CLI access, and remote iPhone access. crystl runs any CLI agent — Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity CLI (agy), Kimi Code, opencode, aider, goose, Ollama — alongside open models on your own hardware or a managed host. It is local-first, Swift-native, and macOS-only. Compare it against tmux plus worktrees, which is free but leaves the supervision to you, or against cloud control planes like Cursor's background agents that run in
Behind the Verdict
The pitch only lands if you already run two or more CLI agents on a Mac. If you do, crystl is solving the exact problem you have: five terminal windows, one of them stuck on a permission prompt you missed twenty minutes ago. If you run one agent occasionally, a plain terminal plus a git worktree is cheaper and you'll never open half of crystl's panels. Where crystl earns its keep is supervision. Floating cards replace scrollback archaeology — approvals, questions and denials surface in your field of view, tagged by gem. The agent activity panel answers the question that actually costs you money: which agent is working, which is stalled, who reports to whom, and what files each one has touched. In practice the isolation model is the quiet win. One worktree per shard means you can point three agents at the same repository and not arbitrate merge conflicts by hand. Off-screen shards drop to near-zero render work, and crystl's own changelog says it corrected its turns-left estimate after compaction, where it previously ran roughly a third high — a small fix that matters if you plan work around that number. Pick crystl over tmux plus worktrees when you want the coordination layer built in: shared WORKBENCH.md, the project optimizer scoring every repo for agent-readiness, sequences triggered by file change or poll, and an iPhone app for approving access from anywhere. Pick tmux if you want zero GUI, zero cost, and you enjoy writing your own supervision scripts. Pick Cursor's background agents instead if you'd rather agents run in cloud VMs and hand back a pull request. Pass on crystl if you're on Windows or Linux, or if procurement needs SSO and centralized management — that isn't the shape of this product. Heavy Antigravity CLI users should note the profile's caveat
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas crystl actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Create a gem for the project, open three shards so each agent gets its own git worktree and branch, and set approval mode to 'in gem' so anything outside the project still comes to you.
Outcome: Three agents work the same codebase without branch collisions, and every approval arrives as a floating card color-coded to its gem instead of scrolling past in a terminal you were not reading.
Anoint an orchestrator to watch the worker shards and read their terminals, then leave the desk and steer from the iPhone app — approving access, answering questions, and spawning new agents over the encrypted relay.
Outcome: The orchestrator catches stalled workers that would otherwise sit idle, and you keep the fleet moving from anywhere rather than waiting to get back to the Mac.
Point a shard at an open model through Ollama or LM Studio, then use token tracking to see what each plugin and skill costs per turn and disable the heavy ones.
Outcome: Frontier agents handle the tasks that need them, open models absorb the bulk work, and token tracking shows exactly which plugins are worth their context.
Use Cases
- Run several Claude Code agents on the same repo at once, each isolated in its own git worktree and branch.
- Anoint an orchestrator that monitors subagents and reads their terminals instead of polling five stalled agents.
- Track token burn per shard and disable expensive plugins to stretch your context window.
- Approve access and answer agent questions from floating glass cards without hunting through terminal windows.
- Assemble a crystl quest party of role-played agents that divide the work, debate, and report back.
- Schedule nightly sequences to update dependencies, run security scans, or refresh docs on a file-change trigger.
- Monitor shard status, approve requests, and spawn new agents from the iOS app while away from your desk.
- Run agents on open models through Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp, or a hosted GLM plan to cut token cost.
Models Under the Hood
as of 2026-10-17
Limitations
- crystl is macOS-only, so Windows and Linux developers are out.
- The iPhone companion app is included on the free Apprentice tier and steers agents over Wi-Fi, while any-relay remote use from anywhere is a Guild ($170/year) capability.
- Several coordination features — agent orchestration, custom heroes and agent parties, full CLI access for agents, unlimited scheduling, and sequence automation — are gated behind Guild, and free-tier scheduling caps at 3 shards.
- Heavy Antigravity CLI users will find that action panels lack hook support for that agent.
as of 2026-10-09
Verification history
We have re-verified crystl 9 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
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Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published crystl tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Apprentice
$0/forever
Ideal for
Solo macOS developer who wants parallel isolated agents, pushed approvals and session history without paying anything.
What this tier adds
Free entry point: isolated shards, floating cards, activity panel, history navigator, token tracking, Workbench, MCP servers, Keychain storage, and up to 3 scheduled agent or command jobs.
Guild (yearly)
$170/year
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where crystl's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Apprentice is $0/forever and genuinely usable: isolated shards, floating approval cards, the activity panel, history navigator, token tracking, Workbench, MCP servers and Keychain key storage are all included. Guild at $170/year (about 21% off paying monthly) is the tier that matters if you run a fleet, because orchestration, sequence automation and unlimited scheduling live there. Compared with cloud agent control planes that bill per cloud task, crystl is a flat annual fee and your agent
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of crystl — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
A macOS developer already running Claude Code or Codex can install crystl, create a gem for an existing repo, and open a first isolated shard in minutes — the docs walk through installing the agent, signing in, and launching it in a shard. Anyone standing up open models via Ollama or LM Studio, or configuring remote SSH sessions, should budget an hour. Guild coordination features take longer to
Switching to or from crystl
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From tmux plus worktrees: point crystl at the same repo, create a gem, and let each shard manage its own worktree instead of scripting them by hand.
- →From a stock macOS terminal: install crystl, create a gem for the project, and launch your existing CLI agent in a shard — approvals and history come along automatically.
- →From Cursor background agents: keep your CLI agents and run them locally in shards rather than in cloud VMs, with token tracking replacing per-task cloud billing.
- →From a plain window-per-agent setup: use formations to save and restore the workspace layout you have been rebuilding by hand each morning.
- ↗To tmux plus worktrees: keep the git worktrees crystl created and drive them from tmux, accepting that approval cards and the activity panel are gone.
- ↗To a cloud control plane: move agent execution off your Mac to hosted agents, trading local-first key storage for centralized management.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “crystl”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “crystl” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about crystl.
Official links
Tools that pair well with crystl
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside crystl, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
OpenHands
OpenHands runs autonomous coding agents triggered by GitHub, Slack, Jira, or schedules to review PRs and fix CI.
Kiro
Kiro turns prompts into specs, validates them, then ships with parallel AI coding agents
Claude Code
Anthropic's agentic coding assistant that plans, edits, and runs commands across your repo from the terminal, IDE, browser, or cloud session.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Crystl vs Spider Cloud
If you primarily need to manage and orchestrate multiple AI coding agents on macOS, choose crystl. If your focus is feeding real-time web data to AI agents or RAG pipelines via a reliable API, choose Spider Cloud. They serve fundamentally different needs and are not direct competitors.
Crystl vs Temporal Ai
For teams building fault-tolerant AI agents and backend workflows, Temporal is the powerhouse. Crystl wins if you're a solo macOS developer running multiple Claude Code agents daily and want a polished terminal experience. Choose based on scale: Temporal for production orchestration, Crystl for coding productivity.
Crystl vs Presto Voice
Presto Voice and crystl are incomparable: Presto serves QSR drive-thrus with voice AI automation, while crystl is a macOS terminal for orchestrating coding agents. Choose based on your domain—restaurant operations or software development. For drive-thru chains, Presto Voice drives revenue via upselling; for developers running multiple Claude Code agents, crystl boosts productivity with parallel sessions.
Alternatives to crystl
View allOpenHands
OpenHands runs autonomous coding agents triggered by GitHub, Slack, Jira, or schedules to review PRs and fix CI.
Kiro
Kiro turns prompts into specs, validates them, then ships with parallel AI coding agents
Claude Code
Anthropic's agentic coding assistant that plans, edits, and runs commands across your repo from the terminal, IDE, browser, or cloud session.
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