OpenMausBot: An Open-Source Desktop App for Running a Team of AI Bots

While big companies roll out "personal team of agents" products, one open-source project is heading the other way: bring your own models, and your own computer.

The project is OpenMausBot, an open-source desktop app that puts a team of AI bots into a familiar chat interface. It picked up roughly 1,190 GitHub stars in a single day and quickly became one of the most talked-about open-source projects among developers this week.

Every bot is a real agent

The sidebar lists "contacts," but each one is backed by a real agent process running locally, not a simulated persona. Each can have its own personality, model, working folder and connected apps. You message them like coworkers, watch them work, and approve the steps that matter.

The core idea is bring-your-own-agent. Bots run on the claude, codex and grok command-line tools already installed and signed in on your machine, using the accounts and subscriptions you already pay for, with no new sign-ups and no proxy in the middle. Cursor and local models are also supported, and any engine can point at a custom CLI binary.

Each bot can also get its own computer: a cloud Linux desktop, an isolated local VM, or, after explicit opt-in, your own machine. Add 500+ apps through Composio and the bots can read mail, edit code, drive a browser and run work on a schedule.

Local-first is the pitch and the barrier

Every agent process is managed by a small harness server on 127.0.0.1, and transcripts, keys and events live in a local folder rather than a cloud. The project is Apache 2.0, ships installers for macOS, Windows and Ubuntu, and lets you share an entire "department" of bots as a single file.

That taps a mood common among developers right now. As agents get more capable, people care more about where their data lives, whose model they are using and where the permission boundaries are. OpenMausBot sells neither models nor compute. It sells orchestration, turning the coding agents you already pay for into a team.

The trade-offs are clear. You need to install and sign in to each CLI, pay for each subscription yourself, and deal with VMs and permissions that are not friendly to casual users. It is a workbench for heavy developers more than a consumer product that works out of the box.

What an open-source agent team looks like

A thousand-plus stars in a day says something: AI coworkers working inside a chat app has moved from concept to something developers want to run themselves. Closed products will polish the experience while open projects hand control back to users, and the two approaches will likely coexist for a long time.

For developers juggling several coding-agent subscriptions, OpenMausBot offers one answer: stop switching between terminal windows and put them all in the same group chat.