Ditch Community Edition

Ditch Community Edition, which the site calls The Ditch, is a local-first macOS workspace for running and supervising Codex sessions across several projects at once. You add the repositories you're working on, launch Codex from inside the app, and it keeps every session attached to its project with a status, a history and a notification when it needs you. It's open source under the AGPL, and there's no account, no cloud and no email gate on the download.

The problem is what happens once a developer has more than one project and an AI coding agent working on each. Codex runs in a terminal, so three projects means three terminals, three sets of scrollback, and no single place that says which session is running, which is waiting for input, and which finished an hour ago. The Ditch turns that into a workspace. Each project has its sessions, each session has a state of running, waiting, completed or failed, and the app notifies you locally when something changes so you can keep working elsewhere.

How it works is a two-part design. A Rust runtime called ditchd coordinates the workspace and persists projects and session state in SQLite on your machine, and a Flutter macOS app talks to it over versioned JSON on a Unix socket. For a local project, ditchd launches the Codex CLI with codex exec in its own process group per turn, routes your prompt through standard input, and resumes follow-ups with the native thread ID so the conversation continues rather than starting over. For a project on another machine, a remote ditchd runs over SSH and drives codex app-server, with thread resumption persisted the same way. You need a compatible Codex CLI installed and signed in, and for SSH projects a reachable OpenSSH host running Linux or macOS.

Around the sessions there's a project file browser, editing for supported file types, and an integrated terminal for running project commands, so a quick fix or a test run doesn't force a context switch. The FAQ is explicit that it isn't trying to replace your editor or your terminal, and it doesn't replace Codex either. It's a workspace layer around Codex that launches and oversees sessions while keeping them tied to their projects.

Getting started is the beta .dmg from the site, a Codex CLI that's installed and signed in with codex login, and a first project added from a folder or a Git repository. From there you start a session, give it a prompt, and watch the status change from running to waiting or completed while you move on to the next project. Follow-ups pick up the same thread, so a session you left yesterday continues with its history intact, and the session list stays attached to the project it belongs to rather than living in a global log.

It's built for solo founders, indie hackers, AI-native builders and consultants who operate several codebases with Codex and want one view of all of them. It's macOS only in the current release, and Codex is the only supported agent, so teams standardised on other coding agents or on Linux desktops will need to wait or fork. Consultants juggling client codebases get the same benefit, one place to see which engagement's agent is waiting on them.

The local-first stance is the differentiator. Projects and session state never leave your machine, there's no Ditch account, and the download from the site doesn't ask for an email, an account, cookie consent or an anti-bot check. The repository on GitHub carries the full source under AGPL-3.0-only, with build instructions for Flutter 3.10 or later, Rust 1.85 or later, Xcode and Git if you'd rather compile it yourself. The maker, DitchNow, notes that commercial distributions are produced separately under a proprietary license, and the community repo includes a narrow public client for discovering and installing those builds, so a paid edition exists alongside the free one. There's no committed public roadmap; feedback goes through GitHub issues and discussions.

Where it sits relative to other ways of running an agent is as the supervisor rather than the agent. A terminal gives you Codex with no memory of what's running elsewhere. An IDE integration ties the agent to the one project that's open. The Ditch is the layer above both, tracking many sessions across many projects with each turn isolated in its own process group, which is how ditchd can tell you cleanly when one has finished or failed.

Access is open source and free. The current build is distributed as a beta .dmg from theditch.dev, requires macOS 11 or later, and expects the Codex CLI to be present and logged in. There's no pricing page for the Community Edition and no published contact email, so the GitHub repository is the place for questions, and the site's FAQ covers the basics of scope and platform support.