ORCH — CLI runtime I built for accountable AI agent teams (state machine, shared context, messaging)

[oxgeneral]

What I built

ORCH — a TypeScript CLI runtime for coordinating teams of AI agents from one terminal.

For AgentScope users

AgentScope provides excellent building blocks for multi-agent systems. ORCH takes a different angle: CLI-native orchestration for coding agents that run as external OS processes (Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, shell scripts).

The problem I kept hitting: running 5 agents in parallel means 5 things that can fail silently. ORCH provides the accountability layer.

State machine design

todo → in_progress → review → done
             ↓
          retrying (PID tracking + auto-restart)

Every task requires explicit sign-off before closing. Agents share context via a typed key-value store:

orch context set schema-version "v3"
orch context get schema-version  # any agent can read

Inter-agent messaging:

orch msg send agt_reviewer "Backend API complete, ready for QA"

Details

• 1647 tests, TypeScript strict, MIT
• npm install -g @oxgeneral/orch
• TUI dashboard (Ink/React)

Repo: https://github.com/oxgeneral/ORCH