contrabass vs helmor
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. — versus — Local-first desktop workbench for orchestrating coding agents: per-repo workspaces, task dispatch, live status and runnable actions — GUI plus CLI, Apache-2.0.
Contrabass drains an issue queue headlessly with verification; Helmor is the interactive GUI take on the same orchestrate-local-coding-agents job.
| contrabass | helmor | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 198 | 1.3k |
| Forks | 23 | 115 |
| Language | Go | TypeScript |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Last activity | 2 months ago | today |
| Topics | coding, orchestration | coding, orchestration |
| Curated connections | 6 | 3 |
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.
helmor — the curator's take
Workbench, not factory: you stay the lead and dispatch agents into per-repo workspaces, watching status like a build queue. Cleaner mental model than kanban swarms for a solo dev. Skip for headless issue-queue automation (contrabass) or if you live inside one OpenCode session (codenomad).