Introducing LongClaw

One canvas where humans plan and agents execute. LongClaw 0.1.0 is out today — a local-first project manager for macOS, open source under MPL 2.0.

The split it fixes is simple to describe. Planning happens in a cloud tracker; execution happens in the git repo, increasingly by agents. The ticket becomes a stub, and the agent starts every session blind. LongClaw puts the plan where the work is: every ticket is a directory of plain Markdown inside your project, readable by you in an editor and by an agent in the same session that writes the code.

Your tickets are files

Point LongClaw at a folder and it creates .longclaw/ — and writes nowhere else.

your-project/└── .longclaw/    ├── longclaw.yaml         project identity, people, labels    ├── AGENTS.md             the editing contract agents read    └── tickets/        └── LC-42/            ├── ticket.md     the complete record            └── attachments/

One ticket.md holds everything: metadata, description, checklist, comments, activity. It diffs in review, commits with the work it describes, and outlives the app.

Agents are first-class

Every project gets a generated .longclaw/AGENTS.md — the editing contract an agent reads before touching a ticket. Activity is append-only and attributed, human or agent, never guessed. Agents create tickets through the CLI, which allocates the key and requires --agent-id:

longclaw ticket create --title "Fix the retry policy" \
  --agent-id claude-code --agent-name "Claude Code"

When an agent edits a file directly, a native watcher updates the board without a refresh and shows the edit with an acknowledgement ring in the agent’s green — visually distinct from human changes, everywhere it matters.

What 0.1.0 does

A board and a dense list over the same tickets. A ticket panel that edits in place. A ⌘K palette over every action. The file watcher, the agent contract, and the longclaw CLI — the same crate as the app. Five themes across light, dark, and system appearance.

It works with no account and no sync. No sign-in, no cloud, no telemetry, no crash reporting. Nothing about you, your projects or your tickets leaves your machine — and this repository tracks its own work with LongClaw, through the same contract your agents will read.

Since 0.2.0 the app makes exactly one request, and only to learn that a newer LongClaw exists: one static file from its own GitHub release, carrying nothing that describes you, downloading nothing until you press a button, and switched off in one place if you would rather it did not. With no internet at all, every feature behaves the same; the only thing that does not happen is that check. The promise was never no connection, it was no information, and that is the one worth holding.

The app is signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarized, so first launch is one dialog and one click. The check reads a ticket stapled inside the app, so it works offline too — which it had better, for a tool that expects to be useful on a plane. Getting started shows exactly what it says.

What is deliberately not here

No terminals inside the app; that is Phase 2. No sync, teams, accounts or billing; that is Phase 3. No Windows or Linux build, no Intel binary, no custom themes, no hard deletion. These are separate phases, not partial features — nothing in this release is a preview of them.