Build capabilities. Let workflows emerge.
Dispatch is a local-first environment for people and coding agents working on the same software. It is an ongoing experiment in making the useful parts of work reusable, visible, and available to everyone involved.
A concrete artifact
One environment for agents, branches, terminals, context, and human direction.
Dispatch keeps the surface of collaboration visible. The point is not to replace engineering judgment; it is to give that judgment something durable to work with.
An observation
Workflows are useful. Work does not always stay predictable.
That usually means a large prompt, a prescribed sequence of steps, and a hidden state machine. It works until the work changes shape—when the task needs a second opinion, a screenshot, a different branch, time to run, or a person to take over.
Workflows are useful when they clarify repeatable work. Software work also changes shape: investigations, decisions, tools, and context need room to adapt around them.
A different starting point
Keep the useful pieces close at hand.
Instead, give humans and agents the same dependable primitives. A terminal can stay alive. A worktree can isolate a change. A message can carry a decision. A pin can preserve the one URL that matters.
Capabilities compose. Workflows can grow around them. That leaves room for repeatable patterns without requiring every useful collaboration to start with a predefined path.
How it started
The useful pieces of collaboration should not be trapped in a session.
Dispatch grew out of using coding agents on real software projects and repeatedly encountering the same constraint: the useful pieces of collaboration were trapped inside individual sessions and rigid workflow boundaries.
The project became an attempt to make those pieces durable, shared, and composable. Its features are interesting only insofar as they make that observation concrete.
Continue reading
Follow the experiment into the code.
Read the principles that guide the experiment, inspect the architecture as evidence, or run Dispatch locally if the idea is useful enough to test in your own work.