Lionclaw is an open-source local control plane and orchestration harness developed in Rust by moshthepitt. It is designed to manage, sandbox, and standardize how existing CLI coding agents (such as Codex, OpenCode, and other agent harnesses) operate against local codebases. In daily developer workflows, Lionclaw sits between the user, the project environment, and the underlying AI agent CLI. Rather than replacing agent CLIs, it wraps them to manage project identity, local state persistence, session durability, containerized execution, communication channels, and scheduled background tasks. Lionclaw differentiates itself by focusing on governance, auditability, and boundary enforcement around coding agents. Instead of tethering the developer to a specific proprietary model or monolithic interface, it provides a modular framework for running multiple independent agent harnesses while maintaining unified audit logs and workspace state. Lionclaw is distributed under the MIT license and is maintained as a public Rust workspace on GitHub.
Local Control Plane — Wraps existing CLI agents (like Codex and OpenCode) to standardize runtime configuration and project identity. - Durable Sessions & Local State — Preserves context, project state, and interaction histories across repeated terminal invocations. - Audit Trails — Captures detailed logs of agent executions, workspace modifications, and tool calls for accountability. - Scheduled Work & Channels — Supports background task execution, event channels, and extensible skills automation. - Native Rust Architecture — Compiled as a high-performance, modular Rust workspace with built-in migration and container integration support.
Use cases
Use Case: Multi-Agent Orchestration Developers using different CLI agents for specialized tasks can route invocations through Lionclaw to maintain consistent environment variables, project identity, and execution policies across all tools.
Use Case: Sandboxed Background Tasks Engineers running unattended codebase migrations or automated maintenance tasks can execute them inside Lionclaw's containerized boundaries while retaining a full audit log of all changes.
Use Case: Durable Session Management Teams working on large refactoring initiatives can maintain persistent session states and custom workspace skills across multiple terminal restarts without losing operational context.
Who it is for
Lionclaw is built for developers, platform engineers, and DevOps teams who want a local control layer to manage, isolate, and audit terminal-based coding agents across their repositories. It is not intended for developers seeking an all-in-one standalone graphical IDE or a single proprietary chat assistant.
Install guide
Installation Build Lionclaw directly from source using the Rust toolchain: bash git clone https://github.com/moshthepitt/lionclaw.git cd lionclaw cargo build --workspace --release export PATH="$PWD/target/release:$PATH"
First Run Verify that the Lionclaw binary is accessible in your path and check available commands: bash lionclaw --help Ensure that any underlying agent CLIs (such as Codex or OpenCode) and their required API keys or environment variables are configured in your shell environment.
Example Session Navigate to your project directory and start an orchestrated agent session: bash cd /path/to/your/project lionclaw run --mission "Audit dependencies and migrate legacy configuration schemas"
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