Orca: The Agent Development Environment for Running AI Coding Agents in Parallel

Orca is a desktop application designed to help users manage multiple AI coding agents in parallel. This is a significant problem many developers face when using Claude Code, Codex, or similar AI coding agents in their terminal - the agents often get bogged down on one task, requiring the user to juggle branches, stashing changes, and open multiple terminal windows looking identical.

Named an Agent Development Environment (ADE) by its creators, Orca simplifies this process. Unlike traditional Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that focus on a single human typing code, an ADE supervises several AI agents working simultaneously on the same project. Orca is a cross-platform desktop application available on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

At its core, Orca utilizes git worktrees. These allow for multiple branches to be checked out into separate folders, each sharing the same git history. When you start a new task in Orca, it automatically creates a new git worktree and launches the chosen AI agent within it. This means you can have five agents working on the same repository simultaneously without any conflicts or the need for constant stashing.

To use Orca, you simply add a repository, create a new worktree for your task, select an agent - Claude Code, Codex, Cursor CLI, or any other supported agent - and Orca takes care of the rest. You can then race the agents, review their output in split panes, and commit and push the best results from within the application. Once you're done, you can easily delete any underperforming worktrees.

Orca offers a range of features to streamline this workflow. It supports parallel worktrees, allowing you to run multiple agents on the same project without interfering with each other. You can bring your own AI agents, as Orca comes preconfigured for many popular CLI agents, including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Cursor CLI, and others.

You can annotate AI diffs with markdown comments and send them back to the agent for feedback. Design Mode enables you to inspect and edit UI elements directly within Orca, while the built-in terminal provides GPU-rendered, unlimited split functionality with scrollback that survives restarts.

In comparison to Cursor, another AI-first code editor, Orca and Cursor serve different purposes. Cursor is designed as an AI-assisted editor where the AI lives inside the editor, providing autocomplete suggestions and chat functionality. Orca, on the other hand, acts as an orchestration layer for CLI agents, running multiple agents side by side in isolated branches and providing tools to review and merge their output.

While Cursor requires a subscription for access to the models, Orca is completely free and open source under the MIT license. Users pay for the agents themselves through their own subscriptions or API keys.