Mental Model
Tycho is a local-first operator console for agent sessions. It does not replace Codex, Claude, OpenCode, or custom harnesses; it gives them one supervision workflow.
Project
Section titled “Project”A project is a registered workspace with a key, name, path, group, and default harness. Tycho runs agent sessions from the project path.
Agent Session
Section titled “Agent Session”An agent session is one durable unit of supervised work. It keeps the starting prompt, harness, status, runs, conversation, logs, attachments, and follow-ups. Tycho’s code and CLI often call this a managed agent.
An agent session can create bounded child work and receive a durable report when that work reaches a terminal state. See Agent Session Lifecycle for run and attention states, and Delegating Work Between Agents for explicit parent ownership, callbacks, privacy, archives, and the same-server boundary.
Harness
Section titled “Harness”A harness is the adapter Tycho uses to run a coding-agent CLI. Codex, Claude, OpenCode, and Pi are built in; compatible custom profiles can use any of those four native adapter families. Tycho standardizes the operator loop, while authentication, permissions, models, and runtime behavior remain harness-specific. See Harnesses.
Remote Server
Section titled “Remote Server”A remote server is one Tycho installation that owns its projects, agent sessions, logs, credentials, and actions. Remote UI can combine Local and configured peers in one view, but every read or mutation routes back to the resource owner. The CLI targets a configured peer with --server.
Operator Loop
Section titled “Operator Loop”Start work, watch status and attention, inspect output, respond, then resume, re-run, schedule, delegate, or archive. Tycho keeps this loop local by default: project configuration, runtime state, logs, prompts, and history stay under user-controlled paths.