Kelpie is a polished Mac desktop app that shows which agents need you and runs a full feature workflow around worktrees. Pilothouse is an open-source daemon focused on rules and approvals, on macOS and Linux.
Kelpie, from Feather AI, is an “attention board for coding agents” for Apple Silicon Macs. It reads what Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and OpenCode write to disk, flags sessions that are waiting on you, and can share the board with your phone over your own Tailscale. It needs no account. Sessions it starts run in tmux, and it has a strong worktree flow: branch, free ports, dev servers, preview and a PR.
| Feature | Pilothouse | Kelpie |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Single Go binary: daemon, CLI, terminal inbox, phone web app | Mac desktop “attention board” for agents |
| License | Yes: Apache-2.0 | No: Proprietary |
| Price | Free | Free download (pricing not stated) |
| Platforms | macOS, Linux (Windows on the roadmap) | macOS, Apple Silicon |
| Agents | Claude Code, Codex | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode |
| Keep your terminal and how you launch agents | Yes: Yes — official hooks; any terminal, even inside tmux or herdr | Partly: Reads sessions from disk; sessions it starts run in tmux |
| Your rules before every tool call | Yes: YAML + CEL, user and repo files, any deny wins | No: No |
| Approve from your phone | Yes: Yes — each device signs its decisions | Yes: Yes — board shared over your Tailscale (off by default) |
| Phone notifications | Yes: Web Push, ntfy (with buttons), Slack/Discord webhooks, desktop | Partly: Desktop notifications you can answer; phone push not documented |
| Presence-aware (no phone buzz while you’re at the desk) | Yes: Yes — OS idle time; manual override | No: Not documented |
| Works without an account | Yes: No account | Yes: No account |
| How the phone reaches your machine | Your own Tailscale (HTTPS via Tailscale Serve). No ports opened. | Your own Tailscale |
| Worktree tasks | Yes: pilothouse task new → worktree + branch + agent | Yes: Yes — plus ports, dev servers and a PR flow |
| Several machines in one view | Partly: Not yet — one daemon per machine | No: Not documented |
A native Mac app with a menu-bar count, Dock badge and notifications you can answer. Pilothouse’s UI is a terminal inbox plus a web app.
Worktrees with free ports, dev servers, an https preview domain and a PR review mode. Pilothouse tasks give you a worktree, a branch, a diff and a PR, and stop there.
Kelpie reads Cursor and OpenCode sessions too.
Download and open. Pilothouse needs a one-time pilothouse setup and, for the phone, Tailscale.
Pilothouse decides before a tool runs — deny, ask or allow — with YAML and CEL. Kelpie has no policy engine.
Pilothouse is Apache-2.0 and runs on macOS and Linux (amd64 and arm64). Kelpie is proprietary and Mac-only.
Every remote decision is signed by a key that never leaves the paired device, and checked by the daemon.
At the desk, the agent’s own dialog appears and nothing is held. Away, the request goes to your phone.
Facts about Kelpie checked on 22 October 2026 from: kelpie.sh, Kelpie docs. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.
It doesn't replace your terminal or your agents. Install, run pilothouse setup, and keep working.
curl -fsSL https://pilothouse.dev/install.sh | shbrew install xasdta/tap/pilothousethen run pilothouse setup