Hi HN,

Circus Chief is a tool for managing coding agent sessions from a browser. It's specifically optimized for small screens. It supports Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Google Gemini CLI agents.

Features

Agents can operate Circus Chief itself. Agents can spawn sessions, schedule sessions, interact with the Kanban board — anything you can do in the UI, an agent can also do.

Schedule work ahead of time.

Automatically reschedule when you hit usage limits.

Configurable, chainable prompt templates.

User-defined commands - agents can run them and see the results, and so can you in the UI. Handy for local CI or routine workflow steps.

Worktree-per-session isolation, or elect to work on a specific branch.

Shared canvas - this is a place for shared artifacts that don't belong in the code. Useful for iterating on planning documents.

Bring your own provider. Use subscription auth for Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, or point sessions at third-party providers with Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible endpoints.

If you want to try it:

  npx circuschief

Stack: Vue 3, Express, SQLite, WebSockets. Plain JavaScript. Tailwind.

Development process

I built this almost entirely from my phone and tablet — starting with Claude Code using both Anthropic and z.ai, then adding Codex to the mix around a month ago.

It was vibe coded in the sense that I was not reviewing many individual lines of code. I did review and iterate on plans with the agents, but often stayed out of implementation details. If a plan made sense then I would usually have the agent review it a few times before just letting the agent implement without any intervention. I've enjoyed building this way, but I don't deeply understand a lot of the details of the implementation. That's bitten me exactly once so far, see this issue: https://github.com/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief/issues/944

I used Circus Chief to build Circus Chief from a very early stage. I bootstrapped with Vibe Kanban, then switched to dogfooding once Circus Chief was usable. A lot of the app has been built through the app itself.

By the numbers

2,184 agent sessions since Christmas 2025 — 1,423 were child/follow-up sessions.

Agent mix: 1,818 Claude Code sessions, 363 Codex sessions, and 3 Gemini sessions.

50,929 conversation messages across those sessions.

41 sessions (1.9%) contained strong profanity in user-authored messages.

990 sessions linked to GitHub PRs, across 685 distinct PRs, 759 branches, and 731 worktrees.

Average logged agent call: 131.3 seconds.

2,410 commits on main; 883 pull requests total — 847 merged (~96%).

Repo scale: 887 tracked files and 310K current lines of code (excludes lockfiles, fixtures, and recorded test cassettes).

Peak day: 76 commits on March 21, 2026, first at 12:49am, last at 11:57pm — one every 18 minutes for 23 hours.

Busiest merge day: 28 pull requests shipped — New Year's Day, 2026.

Largest PR by diff: 140K insertions across 92 files — replacing mock Claude fixtures with VCR-style record/replay.

Code: https://github.com/ferrislucas/Circus-Chief

Analytics disclosure: the npm build includes PostHog for anonymous page-view analytics (session recording off, DNT respected). Disable with --no-analytics, in Settings → General, or build from source without a PostHog key.