Orc: Multi-Agent Coding Orchestration Tool Adds Planning and Notification Features
What Orc Does
Orc is a GitHub repository that orchestrates multiple AI coding agents across all your projects from a single terminal user interface (TUI). It works with Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex, Gemini CLI, or any agentic CLI that can take a prompt. The architecture mimics how software gets built: investigate codebases, plan work, break it down, dispatch engineers, build in parallel, review everything, and deliver clean branches.
Latest Release Features
The new release introduces several key features:
- Planning as a first-class phase: You can plug in whatever planning tool you use (specs, design docs, task lists), and this flows through to engineers alongside the codebase context Orc gathers. Agents plan before they build, which produces dramatically better results.
- Notification system: Your laptop pings you when the horde needs something. Blocked agent? Ping. Question only you can answer? Ping. Plan needs your review? Ping. Everything else runs silently and auto-resolves.
- Lifecycle hooks: Every phase of the orchestration lifecycle (planning, dispatch, review, delivery) now has natural language hooks. You describe how your development process works in plain English, and Orc adapts to it. This lets you bring your own workflow, review standards, and delivery pipeline.
Technical Details
Orc runs locally with Bash, tmux, and git worktrees. State is maintained in three files. There's nothing to deploy. The author reported describing 3 features at 9am and merging 8 PRs by end of day, with every PR having already been through automated multi-agent review before opening them.
Background and Context
The project name "Orc" comes from the author's accidental reference to AI coding agents as "the orcs" because they work in hordes, are relentless, and do exactly what you tell them. The tool was inspired by Steve Yegge's Gas Town posts about multi-agent orchestration for coding, but aims to be more accessible than the complex 189k-line Go system with seven agent roles that Yegge described.
📖 Read the full source: r/ClaudeAI
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