BDFL - Benevolent Delegator for LLMs
Open Source Task Manager for Codex & Claude Code
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BDFL - Benevolent Delegator for LLMs - Open Source Task Manager for Codex & Claude Code

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BDFL is an open-source terminal supervisor for Codex, Claude Code, and Ollama sessions. Work with a planning agent, compare and approve versioned plans or individual sections of it, then let isolated worker agents implement the approved work while BDFL handles scheduling, checks, review, verification, integration, and recovery.

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Maker
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Hi everyone👋 I kept running into this problem, where I would ask an agent for a small change in plan, get a completely rewritten plan back, and then be too tired to read the whole thing again.

I wanted a way to see exactly what changed in the plan, review smaller sections, lock sessions so they don't change upon revision and go back and execute an older version when my latest instructions somehow made everything worse.

I wanted to execute plans in smaller chunks without filling up my main terminal window, make chunks run through subagents that I can still interact with and be able to change direction for particular subagent without restarting the whole workflow

That became : the open-source delegator, and not the .

You can do everything I mentioned above. It works with , , and also supports models. You can plan with one model, execute with another, mix open and closed models, or arrange the workflow however you prefer.


PS: It's OpenAI day, so wanted to launch it today. The workflow is still fresh. Feedback, bug reports, ideas, stars, and contributions would mean a lot.

Saw this on X earlier and came straight here. Approving small plan sections instead of rereading one giant rewritten plan is exactly the pain. Congrats on shipping this for launch day! Curious, what made you pick the name BDFL?

Maker

 Thanks. BDFL term originally exists in open source world as .

It kinda fit into what this tool does, but also wanted to keep the acronym closely related so replaced Dictator with Delegator and Life with LLMs. Also it installs BDFL & BFDL commands 😆 because D & F keys are together, people can make typos.

It was originally called Claudia (4 days ago).

OpenAI
OpenAI Day
How did GPT-5.6 change the ambition or scope of what you shipped?
Maker
GPT-5.6 Sol genuinely impressed me, especially at xhigh effort. A few times, it pushed back on what I asked for and explained why a different approach would be better, instead of just agreeing with me. It felt less like a yes-man and more like someone I could actually think through the project with. I am also very grateful for those limit resets. BDFL started as a small skill, then became an MCP server, and eventually grew into a delegator for Codex, Claude Code, and Ollama. It ended up becoming much more ambitious than what I originally planned to ship. I just kept coming up with ideas, and it kept helping me build them. Sometimes it felt more like talking to a human!