Design principles
Janissary is built around a small set of tenets. They explain why the app looks the way it does, and why some things it deliberately doesn't do.
Workflow support
Janissary supports the work you're already doing rather than prescribing a workflow of its own. A tab can be a shell, an agent, an editor, or a harness — mix and match freely, whether you're developing code, writing, or managing something else entirely. Profiles let you capture whatever multi-tab setup fits your work and recreate it with one command.
Integrated agents
Agents aren't a separate mode bolted onto a terminal — they're tabs like any other, sharing the same command bar, tab-completion, and history as your shell tabs. You work alongside them in the same interface you already use.
Agent orchestration
Beyond working with an agent, Janissary lets you direct many of them at once: run multiple agents in parallel across tabs, have them message each other to coordinate (see Harness tabs), and use scheduling to run agents automatically without you present.
This is an application, not a platform
Janissary is a user interface that runs on one system and controls work done on that system or others. It doesn't depend on a separate backend service to function — there's no server to deploy or account to create. Starting the app is the whole setup.
Keyboard first, mouse augmented
Every core action — opening tabs, running commands, switching between them — is reachable from the command bar and keyboard shortcuts. The mouse is welcome, but nothing important requires it.
Identical control of local and remote resources
Where your compute lives shouldn't change how you work. An ssh tab reaches a remote host through the same tab model as a local shell, and a workspaced agent gets an isolated clone of your repository whether that clone lives on your machine or elsewhere.
Revision control of assets
Janissary doesn't invent its own versioning scheme. It leans on the tools that already do this well: local revision control through git, and distributed collaboration through GitHub — the same tooling a workspaced agent uses to isolate and later reconcile its changes.
Traceability of work
Complex systems fail in complex ways, and Janissary doesn't pretend otherwise. Every tab keeps its own transcript, the connections panel (see Harness tabs) shows what's running underneath it, and command history records what was run and when — so when something goes sideways, you can unravel it.