contrabass vs squad
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 — Multi-agent terminal collaboration for AI CLIs: a manager, workers and an inspector — Claude Code, Gemini, Codex, OpenCode — coordinating through one-shot shell commands and SQLite. No daemon.
Both coordinate fleets of local coding-agent CLIs in the terminal; Squad does ad-hoc manager/worker collaboration over SQLite with no daemon, Contrabass dispatches from Linear/GitHub issues with worktrees, retries and branch-advance verification.
| contrabass | squad | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 198 | 605 |
| Forks | 23 | 60 |
| Language | Go | Rust |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Last activity | 2 months ago | 1 months ago |
| Topics | coding, orchestration | coding, orchestration |
| Curated connections | 5 | 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.
squad — the curator's take
The unix-philosophy take on multi-agent coding: no daemon, no server, no framework — each agent is a terminal running the CLI you already use, coordinating through /squad slash commands backed by SQLite. Assign a manager, spin workers, add an inspector, watch them divide the work. Radically simpler to reason about than orchestration platforms, and it dies clean (every command is one-shot). NOT for production pipelines or unattended fleets — it's built for a human watching terminals; young (~600 stars) and quiet for weeks at review time, so kick the tires before making it a habit.