Orca (ADE)
by Stably AI — LICENSE copyright reads Lovecast Inc.
“The AI Orchestrator for 100x builders.” An agentic development environment that runs Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode or Pi side-by-side, each in its own git worktree, tracked in one place — on desktop, mobile and VPS.
See https://onOrca.dev · source at https://github.com/stablyai/orca
Not the Orca language model
This is not Orca LLM, Microsoft’s 2023 instruction-tuned small model. Different thing entirely, same name. This note is the coding-agent orchestrator at
onOrca.dev.
Licence — confirmed
MIT, verified in LICENSE and the README badge. One wrinkle worth recording: the copyright line reads “Copyright (c) 2026 Lovecast Inc.” while the GitHub org is stablyai and package.json sets "author": "stablyai". GitHub’s API reports the licence as None. The MIT grant itself is unambiguous; the corporate naming is not, and is worth a look if provenance matters to you.
What it is
Orca’s organising idea is parallel worktrees. Rather than one agent working in your checkout, you fan a single prompt across several agents, each isolated in its own git worktree, then compare the results and merge the winner. The agents run under your own subscriptions.
The other distinguishing bet is reach: alongside the desktop app there is a real mobile companion — an iOS App Store listing (orca-ide), an Android APK, and TestFlight builds — so you can watch agents finish and send follow-ups from your phone. It also runs on a VPS.
Features
- Parallel worktrees — fan one prompt across five agents in isolated worktrees, compare, merge the winner
- Mobile companion — iOS and Android; notifications when an agent finishes, steer from anywhere
- Terminal splits and SSH worktrees — work against remote machines
- Design Mode and Annotate AI diffs — review surfaces rather than raw patches
- GitHub and Linear native integrations
- Drag files to agents
- Orca CLI — scriptable entry point alongside the GUI
- Ships 8 skills and 8 skill guides in-repo
Architecture
Electron + TypeScript, pnpm workspaces, with separate mobile/ and native/ trees alongside src/. Builds are published for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux AppImage. Localised READMEs in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French and Portuguese.
Superpowers
Worktree isolation is the honest technical answer to the problem every multi-agent harness hits: agents editing the same files trip over each other. Orca makes isolation the default unit of work rather than an advanced option, which turns “run five agents” from a merge-conflict generator into a genuine comparison — you are sampling five attempts and keeping the best, not merging five half-finished ones.
The mobile companion is the differentiator none of its peers have. If your agents run for tens of minutes, being notified and able to unblock one from your phone changes the working rhythm more than another pane layout would.
Caveats
- Copyright/org mismatch between “Lovecast Inc.” and
stablyai, noted above. - Ships daily — the README says outright that its own feature list is “perpetually behind” and points at the changelog as the real one. Treat any feature inventory, including this note, as a snapshot.
- Name collision with the Orca LLM makes searching for it harder than it should be.
Pricing
Free and open source under MIT; you bring your own agent subscriptions. Desktop, mobile and CLI builds are all published at no cost.
Related
- herdr · WeSight · Munder Difflin — the other three answers to running many coding agents at once
- Claude Code vs Codex vs Goose vs Hermes vs Pi — the agents it orchestrates
- Claude Code · Codex · OpenCode · Pi — supported agents
- Orca LLM — the unrelated Microsoft model that shares the name