Novalis

The ship for AI agents to drive, powered by LLMs, directed by humans. One pure-Rust binary: a native, GPU-rendered terminal emulator where coding agents get a real cockpit and the human keeps the controls.

The name comes from the Zion hovercraft in The Matrix, itself named after the Romantic poet.

Why

Terminals were designed for a person typing one command at a time. That stopped being the shape of the work. Agents open panes, run long jobs, spawn other agents, and need somewhere to report back. Novalis treats that as the default case instead of an accident.

What’s in it

• Pure Rust, no Electron and no Tauri — a single binary
• wgpu renderer, Metal on macOS, with DX12 and Vulkan paths
• A 38-tool MCP server so agents can drive the terminal itself, including spawning agent panes
• Attention system that surfaces which pane needs a human
• Plugin runtime on by default
• Your machines, your keys, your sessions — bring API keys or run local models through Ollama, and nothing leaves the machine

Status

Private pre-release. There are no public downloads; it builds from source. macOS is the primary target.