alook vs contrabass
Self-hosted collaboration layer that turns local coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode) into an always-on "AI company" — per-agent email, org chart, kanban, shared memory. — versus — Terminal-first orchestrator for issue-driven AI coding-agent runs — polls Linear/GitHub, runs Codex/OpenCode in git worktrees with retries and verification. Go/Charm rebuild of OpenAI's Symphony.
Both turn local coding agents into a coordinated team working a shared board; alook is an always-on collaboration layer (per-agent email, kanban, shared memory), Contrabass is a leaner issue-queue dispatcher with per-run verification and retries.
| alook | contrabass | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 944 | 198 |
| Forks | 144 | 23 |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Last activity | today | 2 months ago |
| Topics | coding, orchestration | coding, orchestration |
| Curated connections | 9 | 5 |
alook — the curator's take
Pick alook when you already live in Claude Code or Codex and want those agents running as a persistent little team — email in and out, a kanban they work through, schedules, memory that compounds — without writing a line of orchestration code. It's a product, not a framework: BYO agent, you're the CEO. NOT for building agents programmatically (that's LangGraph/CrewAI territory), and if you need budgets, governance, and audit over a heterogeneous fleet, paperclip is the heavier, control-plane take on the same idea. Young project — expect sharp edges and a moving roadmap.
contrabass — the curator's take
Pick it when your work already lives in Linear or GitHub issues and you want local coding agents (Codex, OpenCode, oh-my-*) burning down the backlog unattended — worktree per issue, branch-advance verification so 'success' means commits actually landed, stall detection, deterministic retries, and a Bubble Tea TUI plus embedded web dashboard for visibility. Skip it for single interactive sessions (just run the agent CLI) or if you want cloud-hosted execution — pullfrog is the GitHub-Actions version of this job. Young Symphony reimplementation: the workflow parser accepts more fields than the runtime consumes, and the default team mode needs tmux.