Gentle Shell

gentle-shell™

Your coding agent for controlled development in the workspace you lead.

Your terminal can run an agent. Your workspace should help you lead it.gentle-shell is your coding agent, bringing your changes, tasks, and engineering workflow together—built for Pi.

🎬 See it in action

One prompt, from idea to reviewed commit: memory, workflow, and evidence in a real session.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fa5c0cfe-06e7-4c0d-bd6e-8ac7cb934339

Watch Prefer Spanish subtitles? — the same demo with Spanish captions

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/6d2bc422-a4dd-4ecf-a04b-fcd3bea7fea9

BUILT FOR PI  ·  Shaped by Gentle-AI  ·  Coding-agent workspace  ·  Focused agents  ·  ODD

✨ What's new in v4.1

The v4.1.0 release makes Gentle Shell installable on a clean machine and pins Gentle AI v4.1.1:

• Clean-machine installers: a browser wizard and double-click installers for macOS, Windows, and Linux install what is missing, update what you have, and ask once before changing anything. See Get started.
• Bundled Gentle Shell: a new installation keeps its exact Pi, pinned Gentle AI, Engram, and state in one prefix; existing global installs can migrate, the launcher offers updates, and gentle-shell self-uninstall removes it.
• Background jobs and monitors: bash_background wakes the agent once when a command exits, and monitor turns each output line of a long-running command into an event. Inspect them with /gentle:jobs (Background jobs).
• Contextual Auto permissions: Auto decides with the conversation's context and image input, retries provider failures, and can be the saved default (Permission modes).
• Cross-session coordination: sessions publish a recognizable subject, task aliases, repository scope, and a bounded work classification that other sessions can list, search, and consult with explicit cost permission.
• Session-bound profiles: the active profile binds to the parent session, and orchestrator and reviewer routing apply per session.
• Delegate for a reason and review by risk: see Focused agents, ODD, and Native review.

🧠 How it works

el Gentleman — Think before you build

Say what you need once, then keep moving. el Gentleman helps turn intent into clear scope, a sensible next step, and evidence people can review — without making every task feel like a process meeting.

Docs →

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ODD — The everyday workflow

Organic Driven Development (ODD) is the everyday path: the agent explores before changing anything, clarifies only real decisions, and keeps small understood work small. Substantial, authorized work gets one recoverable feature document — mirrored in memory when available — so progress, evidence, and the next step survive an interruption; behavior changes are test-first by default when a runnable test applies.