Projects
Conflux — A Control Plane for Coding Agents
A local desktop workbench that pulls Claude Code, Codex and Aider into one place: real PTY sessions, attention routing, cross-agent discussion, and an audited permission gate. Built so you don't have to babysit every terminal, only step in when it matters.
Tauri 2 / Rust / Tokio / React / TypeScript / Zustand / xterm.js / SQLite / ConPTY
CASE STUDY · ACT 1/3
The problem
Running five agent CLIs at once, the real cost isn't speed — it's not knowing which one to look at. One is waiting on you, one drifted ten minutes ago, one finished and is idling. A terminal won't tell you any of that.
Positioning
For whom: individual developers who drive several command-line coding agents at once (Claude Code, Codex, Aider and the like). Their working surface today is five or six terminal windows, polled by eye to find out which one is waiting and which one drifted.
What it replaces: the "many terminals, keep switching" method, and the per-agent UIs that each only see their own session. It does not replace the agents — Conflux writes no code; it supervises the things that do.
Why it earns its place: attention routing. "I check each one" becomes "it calls me when it matters", plus an audited permission gate so dangerous actions go through a human first. Neither is possible from inside a single agent's own UI, because both are inherently cross-agent.
A local desktop app; nothing leaves the machine. Deliberate: coding agents already hold your repos and credentials — the control plane shouldn't add a cloud layer on top.
Main modules
- Session canvas: one card per agent, each a real PTY terminal (xterm.js on WebGL), not a log replay.
- Attention routing: waiting-for-confirmation, long silence and errors surface automatically, presented as a dynamic island, a sidebar or the system tray depending on whether you're at the screen.
- Cross-agent discussion: feed one agent's output to another as context and let them review each other.
- Permission gate: risky commands (deleting files, pushing, installing dependencies) stop for a nod; actions and rulings land on an audit timeline.
- Orchestration: session lifecycle, event timeline, recovery after restart.
Stack
- Tauri 2 + Rust (Tokio, SQLite) for the shell and backend. Tauri over Electron was a memory decision — the render stack (WebView2 vs egui) was settled with first-hand measurements, not impressions.
- React + TypeScript + Zustand for state; xterm.js for terminal rendering.
- ConPTY + Windows Job Objects for real pseudo-terminals and whole-tree process supervision, extracted into the open-source conmux (next entry), which Conflux runs entirely on.
- Named-pipe IPC with tightened DACLs, through several red-team rounds; the audit path is modelled fail-closed.
The five-layer architecture (Adapter → Installation → AgentSession → CardView → Orchestration) is mine end to end, including product direction, API/IPC contract freeze and milestone calls.
Status
Shipped as GitHub Release v0.1.1, installers included.
Built solo alongside AI agents: much of the code was agent-generated; my work was architecture, contracts, judgement and verification. I'd rather say that plainly — it's what the project is actually about.