00 — Overview

Vision

A coding agent with the harness depth of Claude Code, Codex, Droid, Cursor, and Devin, given to developers free of charge, supported by honestly disclosed ad inventory. It ships as two front ends over one engine: a world-class terminal CLI/TUI and a native macOS desktop app (apps/mac) that makes the same agent legible — plan, tool calls, diffs, approvals, and cost all visible. Persistent memory across sessions. Long-horizon /goal autonomous mode on every supported provider. No subscription tier.

Target user

Developers who want an agent they can both run in the terminal and watch at work on the Mac: people who script and live in the shell (CLI/TUI), and people who want to see the plan, tool calls, diffs and approvals as they happen (Picasso for Mac, Apple silicon, macOS 14+).

Runtime

Every Picasso session runs on the Picasso engine: one engine process per session, against your real workspace, pinned to version 0.2.2-rc.1 and kept in its own home, ~/.picasso/dsh-home. The CLI/TUI and Picasso for Mac use the same engine, settings and threads. An engine whose version differs from the pin is never used; newer engines arrive through a background updater that checks every 6 hours while idle, verifies a new engine before it switches at the next start, and rolls back on failure (the signed Mac app keeps its bundled engine and installs app updates silently). Contributor details: architecture.