Get your agent team running
Install HiveTerm, define your bees in a hive.yml, and start orchestrating. Everything here works on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Quickstart
Install
Download the app for your OS and open it — that's the whole install.
Add a project
Open a project folder. HiveTerm auto-detects your stack and offers a starter hive.yml.
Start
Open the project — every auto-start bee boots and coordinates through the Queen.
Meetings
Put your agents in a room. One agent orchestrates the others over a structured message bus — they debate, plan, review or build, you read every message as chat threads in the Meetings panel (⌘J), and the outcome lands as a highlighted summary card.
Your first 3-agent meeting
Open the New meeting modal
Hit ⌘⇧J anywhere (or the + button in the Meetings panel). You need at least one project open.
Pick a template and write the topic
Start with Decision and a real call you're facing — "Postgres queue or Redis for background jobs?". The more concrete the topic, the better the meeting.
Choose the team
Pick the orchestrator (who runs the meeting) and 2–3 participants — any mix of Claude, Codex and Gemini. Keep Autonomous mode on so nobody stalls waiting for permission prompts.
Start and watch
The orchestrator spawns the participants, assigns sides, and the thread fills in live. At the end you get the summary card — and the orchestrator cleans up its own team.
The six templates
Decision Two agents argue opposing sides of a call you need to make. Ends with a verdict. Brainstorm Different perspectives on one question, merged into a synthesis. Review A defender vs. attackers over your code or approach, before you ship it. Plan Product and engineering lenses draft and merge an actionable plan. Dev squad Splits a feature between agents that build it in parallel in your repo — exclusive file ownership, cross-review, delivery report. Custom Write your own brief — roles, rounds and flow are up to you. Meetings persist across restarts and load collapsed — expand the ones you want to reread. Delete a single meeting from its thread header, or clear the whole history from the panel. A meeting that starts while the panel is open expands automatically so you can follow it live.
The hive.yml
One file per project defines your agents and processes. Commit it so your whole team shares the same workspace.
name: My App
bees:
claude:
type: agent
command: claude
instructions: "Senior engineer. Ship clean PRs."
api:
command: npm run dev
cwd: ./server
auto_start: true
restart_on_change: ["src/**"]
env:
PORT: 5173| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
name | Project name shown in the sidebar. |
command | The shell command to run for this bee. Required. |
type | "agent" for AI CLIs, "command" for everything else. |
cwd | Working directory for the bee (defaults to the project root). |
env | Environment variables injected when the bee spawns. |
auto_start | Boot this bee automatically when the project opens. |
auto_restart | Restart the bee when it exits with a non-zero code. |
restart_on_change | Restart the bee when files matching these globs change. |
instructions | System-prompt instructions injected into an agent at startup. |
The Queen (MCP server)
A local MCP server on an automatically chosen port. Your agents call these 20 tools to spawn sub-agents, message each other through the agent bus, read output, manage pinned messages and notes, and notify you — all isolated per project.
spawn_bee Create new processes and agents on the fly kill_bee Stop any running process restart_bee Restart crashed or stale processes list_bees See all processes across projects get_bee_status Check health and uptime of any bee read_output Read terminal output from any process write_input Send input to running processes notify Push native desktop notifications list_pins List the pins on any project board create_pin Pin a message or its own plan to the board update_pin Edit a pin's title or body set_pin_done Check a pin off when the work is done delete_pin Remove a pin from the board get_notes Read a project's notes scratchpad set_notes Replace a project's notes append_notes Append a line to a project's notes send_message Send a structured message to another agent read_inbox Receive messages from other agents, no scraping reply Answer a message, correlated to its thread await_reply Block until another agent answers How agents talk (the message bus)
Agent-to-agent messages never travel through terminals: send_message delivers to the recipient's inbox, read_inbox picks it up as clean JSON (pass wait_s to block until something arrives — that's how spawned participants wait for their task), reply answers a specific message, and await_reply blocks the sender until the answer lands. Conversations are threaded with a shared conversation_id, and a message sent with kind:"summary" becomes the highlighted card in the Meetings panel.
Spawn controls
spawn_bee accepts two opt-in flags: model pins the spawned agent to a specific model (omit it to let the orchestrator decide), and skip_permissions starts the agent with its permission prompts bypassed — each CLI gets its own flag injected (Claude, Codex and Gemini all supported). read_output additionally accepts encoding:"screen" to replay the terminal as a rendered VT100 screen instead of raw bytes.
Splits & files
Split groups pair your agents side by side — create one from the sidebar (two ungrouped agents required), drag panes by their grip to reposition or swap, and save layouts with a name. Selecting any member brings the whole split back.
The file explorer opens anything: code gets syntax highlighting with VSCode-style search and in-place editing (⌘S, atomic saves), huge files switch to a virtualized viewer with text search, and images, markdown and binaries each get a proper view.
Need more?
Check the changelog for the latest, or just download and explore — most of HiveTerm is discoverable in the app.