Airbender

Mikhail TurilinTasks & Workflows
Get it for macOS

Keep your project's issues beside the agent doing the work. Track beads or GitHub issues, review plans and results, and start work in branches or worktrees. Run an epic's ready issues in sequence with Autopilot while keeping control of reviews and commits. Requires BB 0.44+; setup installs bend from GitHub Releases on Linux/macOS amd64 or arm64 using curl and SHA-256 tools, with Go 1.24+ needed for source builds on other platforms.

Overview

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Keep your project's issues beside the agent conversation. Airbender connects your backlog to the work: choose an issue, start the agent, review the result, and decide when to commit.

Issues stay in your tracker — beads or GitHub issues — with the requirements, plans and decisions that the next agent needs.

What you get

  • Your backlog inside BB. An Airbender tab beside each conversation and on the New thread screen, with issues grouped into in progress, ready, blocked and closed. Filter by priority, type or category.
  • Quick issue capture. The new-issue field stays visible. Type Fix login redirect #bug #p1 $ux to set the type, priority and category.
  • A clear next step. The current issue is highlighted in the tab. Its status and review buttons also appear around the message box.
  • Reviews that fit the work. Standard workflow guides the agent through definition, planning, implementation and review. Small issues reach you once, at the end; larger ones stop for earlier approvals. Simple workflow leaves you to direct the agent yourself.
  • Parallel work. Start an issue on its own branch or in a worktree with a separate conversation.
  • Epics and Autopilot. Organize work into sub-issues. Autopilot starts an epic's ready issues one after another, with reviews still yours.
  • A lasting record. Read descriptions, acceptance criteria, plans, notes and comments without leaving the conversation. Agents record decisions on the issue as they work.

How it works

The tab and agents use bend to read and update the same tracker. Airbender follows changes made outside the tab and shows sync problems.

On Standard workflow, accepting finished work leads to a commit, or a commit and merge. The agent performs the chosen action; the issue closes when that step finishes.

Getting started

You need BB 0.44 or later on the machine that holds the repository. On Linux and macOS, on Intel/AMD or ARM64, setup installs a precompiled bend from the matching GitHub release after checking its SHA-256 checksum. Go is not required; the download needs curl and sha256sum or shasum. Other platforms can build from source with Go 1.24 or later.

Open the Airbender tab and choose beads or GitHub issues. Setup offers the missing tools and repository instructions in a terminal you can watch. Folders on another machine are not yet supported.

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