Why it exists
Daintree started as a small wrapper around CopyTree, my tool for packing a whole project into one file you can hand to an AI. The wrapper looked after the terminals my agents ran in. Once I realized how useful it was to stop worrying about terminal layouts, it became its own project.
Before this I ran my agents in Ghostty. Git worktrees were the obvious way to keep parallel work apart, and they were awkward enough that I never actually used them.
What it does
Daintree makes worktrees easy and opens terminals quickly. Opening five agents should take five button presses, not a round of splitting panes, starting each CLI and then fixing the layout. Every task gets its own worktree, so agents don't step on each other, and you review the diff before you merge.
I also wanted it to feel nice to use. AI work was starting to feel chaotic, and the other options I tried were busy and showed too much at once. So the interface is clean and minimal: one window, each agent in its own panel, and one view that tells you which runs are waiting on you.
It's built for solo developers and small teams. The part I'm most excited about is the plugin system. It's robust, it's where I think Daintree really shines, and I plan to build a lot more plugins on it.
Who builds it
Daintree is my personal project, and I work on it all the time. Right now it's me, the outside contributors who send pull requests, and an AI development pipeline I run. That pipeline takes an issue through research, planning, implementation, tests and review, and I review the result before anything merges.
I'm based in South Africa. My background is SiteOrigin, where I built SiteOrigin Page Builder for WordPress.
The Daintree app is free and open source under Apache 2.0(opens in a new tab), and it stays that way. Later on I expect to fund the project through plugins, support, and partnerships with AI companies.
The name
Daintree started in 2025 as Canopy. There turned out to be about a dozen other software products called Canopy, so in 2026 I renamed it. Daintree was already the name of the app's default dark theme.
The Daintree Rainforest in Queensland is one of the oldest surviving tropical rainforests on Earth, around 180 million years old. That's the picture I had in mind: lots of species living in the same place, each in its own niche. Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, OpenCode and whatever ships next are the species. Daintree is the habitat that holds them. The full story is on the blog.
Try Daintree
The Daintree app is free and needs no account.