github.com/aaronnat23/disp8ch @main

Chat in plain English. Get real workflows, real decisions, and shipped work. One app. Your machine. Your data.

Website · Install · Why disp8ch · Screenshots · First Prompts · Run Fully Local · All Features · FAQ

Most AI tools give you a chat box. disp8ch gives your chat box a company to run.

Tell it "build a daily 9 AM research digest and send it to my WebChat" and it drafts a real, editable workflow on a visual canvas (triggers, nodes, schedules) and asks before saving. Put a question to a Council of agents and they debate, vote, and record a verdict with the dissent preserved. Give an agent organization goals and budgets and watch heartbeats, costs, and approvals in one dashboard. Everything runs self-hosted, works with fully local models (no API key needed), and every side effect is approval-gated and auditable. No hidden prompt chains, no silent writes.

⚡ Install in 30 seconds

Linux, macOS, or WSL

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aaronnat23/disp8ch/main/scripts/install.sh | bash -s -- --repo https://github.com/aaronnat23/disp8ch.git

Windows PowerShell

$env:DISP8CH_SOURCE_ZIP_URL = "https://github.com/aaronnat23/disp8ch/archive/refs/heads/main.zip"; iex (irm "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aaronnat23/disp8ch/main/scripts/install-windows.ps1")

The installer sets up a managed Node runtime if needed, starts the app at http://localhost:3100, and opens onboarding. Connect a cloud key or a local model (Ollama, llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM, SGLang) and you're working. More options in Quick Start.

🦞 Why disp8ch

• 🗣️ Plain English becomes real automation. Describe a workflow; get an inspectable node graph you can edit, test, replay, and schedule, with 57 templates included. Not a black-box prompt chain.
• 🏛️ Decisions get a courtroom. Council sessions make agents argue options, vote, and record a verdict, with the losing side's concerns kept on the record.
• 🏢 Agents get an org chart. Roles, goals, reporting lines, budgets, heartbeats, and cost attribution: a company-style control plane, not 20 lost terminal tabs.
• 🧠 Memory you can actually read. Scoped, reviewable memory files on disk with promotion queues and conflict flags. The agent learns; you stay in charge of what it keeps.
• 📚 Answers with receipts. Upload files, crawl docs sites, build notebooks, and get cited answers, then turn them into tasks, workflows, or council debates in the same app.
• 🔌 Any model, including none of the cloud. Direct providers, OpenRouter, or fully offline with local OpenAI-compatible runtimes. A built-in advisor recommends what fits your RAM/VRAM.
• 🔒 Nothing moves without your say-so. Read-only agent runtime; every mutation goes through typed, confirmation-gated actions with an audit trail. Risky workflow effects require explicit grants.

📸 See It

Dashboard: live system health, active workflows, agents, board tasks, and quick actions in one operator view.

WebChat is the plain-English control surface for the whole workspace. Workflows is the visual canvas it builds on: trigger → org context → agent brief → council/board follow-up → output.

Council: agents debate live on a court stage, vote, and the chamber records the verdict and the dissent.

Hierarchy: the whole agent organization at a glance: roles, goals, reporting lines, heartbeats, budgets, and workload.

One operating loop: a research brief can become a cited answer, then a Council decision, then a Hierarchy goal, then workflow-backed board tasks, then a saved design artifact, with one audit trail instead of five separate apps.

💬 Try These First

What can this app currently do? Separate implemented, configured, and callable.
Build a daily 9 AM research digest workflow, but ask before saving if anything is ambiguous.
Start a council session on whether we should prioritize reliability or new features.
Spin up a research team, put them in an org, and give them a board task to compare OCR models.
Create a board task for each blocker in this launch document.
Remember that I prefer concise technical answers. Reply only saved.

More in WebChat Examples, including repo audits, cited research briefs, and design generation.

⭐ If disp8ch looks useful, star the repo. It is the best way to help other people find a local-first alternative. Found a rough edge? Open an issue; bug reports are gifts.

How The Tabs Work Together

disp8ch is built around one operating loop, not a pile of disconnected tools:

1. Data Sources ingests PDFs, documents, scraped pages, crawled docs sites, and connected-source snapshots into searchable context.
2. WebChat asks questions over that context, inspects app state, proposes plans, creates tasks, drafts workflows, and hands work to agents.
3. Council turns important decisions into structured debate with recorded options, votes, and verdicts.
4. Hierarchy assigns goals to organizations, roles, agents, budgets, reporting lines, heartbeats, and governance rules.
5. Workflows turns repeatable work into triggerable automations with cron, webhooks, RSS, channels, files, documents, memory, boards, agents, and response nodes.
6. Boards tracks the follow-up work created by WebChat, Council, Hierarchy, Data Sources, channels, or workflow outputs.
7. Capabilities keeps Memory, Skills & Extensions, and MCP Servers together without mixing their responsibilities. Hierarchy Ops can merge an approved skill/extension preset into an existing team, while MCP access is scoped separately per server.
8. Operations keeps Activity, Usage & Costs, and Maintenance visible; approvals, workflow-run detail, logs, and debug tools remain one click away under More tools when needed.
9. Design Studio saves generated artifacts into the same workspace, so a design can become a board task, workflow, source, or decision instead of a one-off image.

That means a research brief can become a cited WebChat answer, then a Council decision, then a Hierarchy goal, then workflow-backed board tasks, then a saved design artifact, with one audit trail instead of five separate apps.

Core Features

Agentic WebChat

• One plain-English control surface for the whole app: ask questions, inspect state, run research, and hand work to agents.
• Build and edit workflows from chat: create from a template, run, activate, or change a node's prompt, model, or config. Every change is a typed action you confirm first; nothing mutates until you approve.
• Real evidence, not vibes: tool-backed research, source and file grounding, post-answer verification, and honest handling of missing evidence.
• Depth on demand: rich answers by default, "keep it short" for compact ones, "thorough" for maximum depth.
• Risk-gated code edits with changed-file accounting and behavioral verification probes.

Visual Workflow Automation

• Drag-and-drop canvas covering triggers (message, webhook, cron, manual, GitHub), agents, HTTP, RSS, files, documents, memory, logic, boards, and channels.
• 57 templates plus a recipe pack for common jobs: issue triage, PR review, uptime watch, news digests, scheduled reports, docs crawling, and more.
• Test as you build: node testing, run-to-node, replay, execution traces, versions, and retry from the failed node.
• Guardrails for unattended runs: per-workflow concurrency (skip duplicates or queue them durably), daily run/cost budgets with optional auto-disable, and escalation policies with quiet hours.
• Notify only on change: a node can emit [SILENT] and downstream sends stay quiet until something actually needs attention.
• Webhook workflows can answer the HTTP caller directly with a response node, and workflow JSON from other visual automation tools imports with unsupported nodes kept as visible placeholders.

Dynamic Runs And Agent Harnesses

• /loop <objective> turns a long-running goal into a durable phase/worker run with pause, resume, cancel, and restart, visible in the Workflows tab.
• Saved run commands make useful autonomous jobs repeatable.
• Ready-made harnesses: a five-phase Project Manager workflow for repo work and a read-only Repo Audit pattern for quick health reports.

Automations: Cron And Webhooks

• Guided scheduling turns plain choices (daily, weekly, interval, one-time) into validated cron jobs with run-now, resync, and enable/disable.
• Signed webhooks with HMAC verification, replay protection, rate limiting, and secret rotation.
• WebChat reads live automation state: "list my automations", "show webhook signing help", "design a daily digest job".

Memory, Skills, And Self-Improvement

• Durable local memory with fast recall, retrieval explain, health view, and cleanup review. Startup profile files stay readable, editable markdown on disk.
• Instant deterministic saves: "remember this: key = value" and "what is ...?" answer in well under a second, no model round-trip.
• Skills install from bundled packs, folders, and git sources, with security scanning, provenance signals, and a verification harness before anything is trusted.
• Reviewable self-learning: after work, the agent proposes memory and skill improvements for your approval instead of silently rewriting your profile. Modes: Off, Review, and Auto with a promote threshold.

Multi-Agent Operations

• Agents get per-agent models, tools, budgets, skills, and channel routing. Spawn parallel sub-agents (optionally in isolated git worktrees) that report back into the same session.
• Boards track the work: typed block reasons, escalation to human triage, recovery actions, and a "Needs human" filter.
• Hierarchy runs the org: multiple organizations, roles, reporting lines, goals with full ancestry, budgets, heartbeats, and workload in one map.
• Council records decisions: structured multi-agent debate, weighted votes, document context, and a final verdict with dissent preserved.
• Governance throughout: approval chains, budget warnings and hard-stops, config rollback, and an immutable audit trail with cost attribution.
• Every workflow side effect is classified from its real configuration just before it runs. Reads run automatically; external or irreversible actions require an approval bound to the exact payload, and unattended high-risk runs fail closed.
• One confirmed plan can create linked objects across Hierarchy, Council, Workflows, Boards, and Goals, recorded as a single inspectable work trail.
• Computer Use (beta, optional, off by default) adds approval-gated native desktop control through a Cua backend, separate from browser automation.

Research, Notebooks, And Data Sources

• Multi-provider web search (Tavily, Brave, DuckDuckGo) with automatic fallback, plus browser automation for pages that need rendering.
• Upload PDF, DOCX, PPTX, TXT, Markdown, and HTML, import a local Markdown folder (e.g. an Obsidian vault), or scrape/crawl sites into searchable, citable sources with semantic search.
• Notebooks group sources with notes, generated outputs (mind maps, timelines, audio-overview scripts), chunk-level citations, and an in-place assistant for narrow source-bounded questions.
• WebChat stays the global surface: turn documents into tasks, goals, Council sessions, designs, or workflows.
• /learn from document <id> compiles source material into a reusable skill candidate, verified and left pending for your review. Learned skills are never auto-installed.
• Hierarchy → Research Team sets up an editable Scout → Analyst → Briefer team with workflows, schedules, and a local markdown knowledge vault in one guided flow.

Design Studio

• Create and revise designs in place with a compact assistant that shares the WebChat session, model, tools, and history.
• Four-card intake: genera