I've been using Crystl now for about 6 months and I couldn't imagine working with Claude code through any other mechanism. I've tried going back to the Claude app as updates get added, but it simply doesn't approach the level of features or UX polish that Chris has down here for us power users.
Crystl's styles and branding resonates with me, because everytime I sit down for a Claude Code session, it resembles the experience of working with an experienced Dungeon Master, who has an idea of where things will go, but unexpected challenges will always come up, for which the DM/CC turns to you, the Adventurer, to figure out how you should respond.
Before agent orchestration, I was the feature and method ideation driver 100% of the time. Now with my agents talking to each other and having greater transparency concurrently, I'm getting novel feedback for approaches I hadn't considered.
The free features alone increased my productivity and I haven't even started working with syncing via the app on my phone.
hey PH! i'm chris, just a dad in Portland, OR, who is obsessed with getting more done with CLI agents. crystl is a real terminal that helps both you and your agents get work done faster than you'd imagine.
i just launched a superorchestration feature. if you run agents across multiple projects like i do, it gets frustrating to keep six different conversations going at the same time. now, with deus, you can launch a superorchestrator that instructs a court of orchestrators, and they report back with progress. and the best part: you can mix and match Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and more, so you're never limited to a single model.
the terminal itself is free. it runs the agents you already use and keeps each project's context in plain files in your project folder. orchestration comes with crystl guild.
today is Hypership Day, so tell me what to fix, change, or add. i'll ship as many as i can before midnight and reply on each request with the version number.
questions, complaints, ridicule (and bugs!) all welcome.
chris
I like being able to mix Claude Code and Codex in the same workflow. Different tasks can suit different agents.
@marianna_tymchuk Thanks! Absolutely. Claude is great for planning. Codex is great for bug checking. Crystl also has an account switching feature if you have more than one claude or codex account and accommodates open models, so you can balance your workload and your tokens.
This is the exact gap I feel running agents across a few projects at once — I end up with a pile of terminal tabs and no idea which agent is actually stuck waiting on me. Keeping each project's context in plain markdown, plus a card I can answer in one click even from my phone, is the part that would change my day-to-day. One question: how does it handle two agents touching the same repo — is that a hard no, or does it just make the collision visible?
@jcbuilds Git Worktree is built in so no collisions. A session can be opened as a worktree with a click. Agents can fanout agents in gitworktree sessions too.
If one orchestrator spins up three more and one of them starts a refactor I didn't ask for, I want to kill that runaway branch without taking down the tree. The notification cards look like the agent coming to ask me — I still need a way to grab it while it's already running.