Relay is an open-source agent harness and orchestration platform developed by jcast90. Built with a Rust core backend and a modern TypeScript frontend, Relay provides a structured environment for managing coding agent tasks, ticket tracking, and multi-channel workflows. In daily operations, Relay acts as a command bridge and management interface. It integrates with issue tracking systems like Linear alongside its internal ticket provider to pull context, queue coding tasks, and coordinate agent sessions. Configuration and execution state are maintained locally in a persistent harness root directory (by default ~/.relay), allowing developers to organize work across channels and tiers. What differentiates Relay from standalone terminal agents is its dedicated harness architecture. Instead of interacting with an isolated conversational loop, Relay pairs ticket polling and provider sync with structured channel state management, exposing both programmatic CLI-driven harness interfaces and a desktop GUI. Relay is distributed as an open-source project under active development on GitHub. It uses standard Rust (Cargo) and Node (pnpm) toolchains for its workspace architecture.
Issue tracker integration — Native synchronization with Linear alongside internal Relay ticketing systems for task queueing. - Channel-based task management — Organizes agent runs, starred workspaces, and tier assignments across discrete channels. - Rust and TypeScript hybrid architecture — Combines a high-performance Rust backend for harness data handling with a modern TypeScript UI. - Configurable ticket polling — Built-in polling limits to regulate external API sync frequency safely. - Customizable harness root — Supports local directory persistence with environment overrides via RELAY_HARNESS_ROOT for testing and isolation.
Use cases
Use Case: Issue-Driven Agent Execution A developer links Relay to Linear, allowing the harness to poll assigned backlog items, convert them into contextual channels, and feed issue specifications directly to automated coding workflows.
Use Case: Multi-Channel Agent Orchestration A team orchestrates several concurrent tasks across prioritized channels, preserving execution metadata, starred status, and tier structures within the local ~/.relay harness storage.
Use Case: Isolated Agent Testing An engineer runs agent evaluation suites by overriding RELAY_HARNESS_ROOT to target sandbox directories, validating file round-tripping and harness adapter logic without mutating active workspace state.
Who it is for
Relay is designed for software engineers and teams looking to orchestrate coding agent tasks tied directly to issue trackers like Linear. It is well-suited for developers who want a structured harness architecture combining a GUI and CLI rather than a single standalone chat prompt. It is less suitable for users looking for a single-binary zero-setup conversational chatbot without task tracking.
Install guide
Installation Clone the repository and build the workspace dependencies using Cargo and pnpm: bash git clone https://github.com/jcast90/relay.git cd relay pnpm install cargo build --release
First Run Initialize the configuration in your default harness directory or define a custom workspace path: bash export RELAY_HARNESS_ROOT="$HOME/.relay" mkdir -p "$RELAY_HARNESS_ROOT" Configure your ticket provider preferences (such as Linear or local Relay tickets) within your GUI or CLI settings.
Example Session Start the Relay harness service and frontend dev server: bash # Launch the harness backend cargo run --release # In a separate terminal, launch the GUI interface pnpm run dev
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