What is Aether?
Aether is a desktop app for people who work with coding agents all day. It runs the agent CLIs you already have (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi and Antigravity) as live sessions, puts them side by side in resizable panes, and keeps the things those agents touch in the same window: Git worktrees, terminals, files, a browser and your notes.
It is a single Rust binary built on GPUI, the GPU-rendered UI framework from the Zed editor. It runs on macOS 12 or newer and on Linux.
What Aether is not
Section titled “What Aether is not”- Not a model. Agent chats run the CLI you installed and signed in to. Aether does not resell tokens. The one API it calls itself is OpenRouter, for direct chats.
- Not a wrapper that hides the CLI. Every approval, question, tool call, diff, subagent and retry the CLI reports shows up in the transcript. Access modes are enforced by the CLI itself.
- Not a cloud service. There is no Aether account. Chats are stored in a local SQLite file.
How the pieces fit
Section titled “How the pieces fit”| You see | What it is |
|---|---|
| Project | A folder you work in. Its chats and worktrees group under it in the sidebar. |
| Agent chat | A chat run by a provider CLI inside a project. |
| Direct chat | A chat with an OpenRouter model and no project. |
| Lead chat | An agent chat that can start and steer child agents through MCP. |
| Session pane | A chat shown in the workspace. Panes split, float, tile or detach into their own window. |
| Explorer | The file tree and editor for a chat’s folder, shown in place of its transcript. |
The concepts section explains each one in detail.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Install Aether from a package or from source.
- Run your first session with a CLI you already use.
- Set up a lead chat that hands work to other agents.
- Learn the shortcuts.