What Is a Habitat?

The review-first workspace, parallel agent delegation, and how Daintree fits together.

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A habitat for your AI agents

A habitat is a desktop workspace that hosts AI coding agents. It's the one window where you run Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Codex, OpenCode, and the rest side by side, watch what they're doing, and decide what to keep. Daintree is the habitat. This page explains the mental model before you reach the detailed UI docs, so the rest of the documentation lands on something solid.

The single idea underneath everything: generation is cheap, review is the bottleneck. Agents can write more code than you can read in a day. So the habitat is built around the part that's actually hard. Daintree is review-first, which means human review is the control gate before any code merges. You delegate the work, monitor it as it runs, review the changes as diffs, and merge the result yourself. Nothing reaches your main branch on its own.

Daintree is not an editor. There's no VS Code fork inside it and no editing surface at all. It's built for one job: delegate work to agents in parallel, supervise them in one place, and review their changes before you merge. If you already run agents from a terminal, you're doing this today across a pile of tabs. The habitat is the same workflow with the isolation and the review gate built in.

Review-first, not autonomous

Review-first means the human review step lives inside the delegation loop, not bolted on after the fact. An agent doesn't open a PR and walk away. It produces changes in an isolated branch, and those changes wait there until you've looked at them. You compare what each agent did, pick the strongest result, and merge it.

That's the opposite of full autonomy. Daintree doesn't try to make agents run unsupervised while you sleep. The whole point is that you stay in control of what ships, with a clean surface for reviewing it. Agents do the typing. You make the merge decisions.

Note
"Review-first" here means the human review gate, not an automated review tool that scores PRs after generation. The gate is you, and it sits between the agent and your main branch.

Parallel delegation

The habitat is designed for running several agents at once. Each task gets its own isolated Git worktree on its own branch, so agents work at the same time without colliding or contaminating each other's changes. One agent refactoring a module and another fixing a bug never touch the same files in the same place.

You launch agents into their worktrees and watch their live state in one window: which agent is working, which is waiting, which is blocked, and which one needs your direction. The work stays cleanly separated until you decide to merge it. No alt-tabbing between terminals, no guessing which window is doing what.

Worktree isolation also keeps each agent's working context intact. Restarting one agent doesn't disturb the others, and the branch each one is on preserves its state independently.

How the pieces fit together

There are four core pieces, and each has a clear role. Together they form one workflow.

  • Project: a Git repository you open in Daintree. It's the top-level container for everything else.
  • Worktrees: isolated branches where the work actually happens. Each one is a separate checkout, so tasks run in parallel without stepping on each other.
  • Agents: the CLI coding tools that do the work. Each runs as a process in its own panel inside a worktree, with live state detection so you can see what it's up to.
  • Review Hub: where you inspect the diffs. Compare what each agent changed, decide which worktree to merge, and merge it.

So the flow is:

  1. Open a project. Point Daintree at a local Git repository.
  2. Create worktrees. Each task gets its own isolated branch.
  3. Launch agents. Run one or more agents in parallel across your worktrees.
  4. Review the diffs. Inspect every change in Review Hub before anything moves.
  5. Merge the best result. You decide what ships.

Where to go next

That's the model: a review-first habitat where agents run in parallel and you stay the gate. The rest of the documentation fills in the mechanics.

  • Installation & Setup: install Daintree, set up your agents, and open your first project.
  • Projects: opening, cloning, and managing repositories.
  • Worktrees: creating and managing the isolated branches agents work in.
  • AI Agents: launching, monitoring, and configuring the agents themselves.
  • Review Hub: inspecting diffs and merging agent changes.