Mainplane: An Open-Source 'Agent Shed' That Keeps AI Agents Working Across Your Own Computers

By Prahlad Menon 3 min read

A thread worth a quick look: Mainplane, billed as “the open-source agent ecosystem.” The one-line version that makes it click: it turns any computers you own into an always-on local AI shed — agents keep working when your laptop is closed.

If you’ve felt the friction of agentic tools that die the moment you shut the lid, or that trap you on one machine with one provider, this is aimed squarely at that.

What It Actually Is

Mainplane is a control plane (a “harness”) for distributed AI agents. It orchestrates agent sessions, manages worker machines (the computers your agents control), establishes a secure mesh network between them, and gives you both a terminal UI and other ways to message your agents. Install is a single quickstart command on any always-on machine:

# Linux, macOS
curl -fsSL https://mainplane.ai/install | sh -s -- server quickstart

The quickstart walks you through three primitives: a provider (the model), workers (computers agents control), and connectors (ways to message your agents).

The Pieces That Stand Out

  • Bring your own model — or subscription. Mainplane can use any model from any provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, …), or the regular limits of a Claude Code / ChatGPT Codex subscription, or a plain API key. That subscription-reuse angle is increasingly the thing people actually want.
  • Agents + computers, with real security controls. It links agents to machines with fine-grained permissions — no Tailscale needed. The networking is built in.
  • A concurrent remote filesystem. Multiple agents can use a shared filesystem at once without risk of de-sync — a genuinely hard problem it claims to handle.
  • Native computer use. It drives your real browsers and applications directly, not a sandboxed facsimile.
  • Context management. Agents have a restricted toolset and manage their own context, retrieving key info from other sessions rather than drowning in one giant window.
  • Runs anywhere, even one box. Server runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux; everything can live on a single device (shared file hosting across machines wants a Linux node).

Why It’s Interesting

The center of gravity in agent tooling is shifting from “one agent in one chat window” to persistent, multi-machine orchestration — agents that run long tasks, survive your laptop sleeping, and coordinate across the computers you already own. Mainplane is an explicitly self-hosted, open-source take on that: your machines, your models (or your existing subscription), your data (not shared by default, opt-in only).

It rhymes with other things in this space — reusing a Claude Code / Codex subscription across sessions is a pattern we’ve seen elsewhere — but Mainplane’s distinguishing bet is the mesh + shared filesystem + native computer use combo that lets a fleet of agents work like a little always-on datacenter in your closet.

Worth a look if you’re building agent workflows that outgrow a single machine: github.com/mainplane-ai/mainplane.