For a lot of teams, where the code runs matters as much as how well the agent codes. Lanes is local-first: the workspace, the agents, and your code stay on your machine.
How Lanes does it
- Local execution. Sessions run the official CLIs in real terminals on your Mac. Lanes is a desktop app, macOS Ventura or later, native on Apple Silicon and Intel.
- Your own auth. Lanes uses your existing CLI login. Requests are not proxied through Lanes servers. Tracker connections follow the same rule: GitHub and Linear OAuth tokens are stored locally in
integrations.jsonand never leave your machine. - Lanes Desktop MCP server. The server that lets agents manage the board runs locally too, as SSE on
localhost:5353. It listens on localhost only, which is why no key is involved. - Encrypted. The data Lanes does store is encrypted in transit and at rest.
The workspace part is real, not a wrapper around a terminal. A built-in file browser shows a lazy-loaded tree of every project you add and opens files in a Monaco editor, the same engine as VS Code, with tabs and Cmd+S saving. The git viewer diffs each worktree against its base branch, side by side, in Changes and History modes. A databases explorer finds the SQLite files in your working folder and runs read-only queries against them, safe to point at a database an agent is actively using. And the process manager lists every CLI process Lanes knows about, including orphans from a crash and external agents it did not start, so nothing runs on your machine without showing up somewhere.
All of this reads and writes your disk directly. There is no sync step, no cloud IDE, no copy of your repo living anywhere else.
Why it matters
You get parallel agent orchestration without handing your source or your credentials to a middleman. Oversight and privacy in the same tool.
It also keeps review honest. When the diff viewer, the file tree, the database explorer, and the terminal all point at the same local directory, what you review is what runs. Verifying an agent's work never depends on someone else's rendering of it.
Set it up
Install Lanes and open it:
brew install --cask lanes-sh/lanes/lanes && open -a LanesThen:
- Grant folder access and add your projects. The Permissions tab in settings verifies Lanes can read and write each one.
- Start a session on an issue. The agent runs in a real terminal against your local checkout.
- Review locally. Open the changed files in the file browser, check the diff in the git viewer, and query the database if the task touched one.
The quick start walks through the first run in about two minutes.
Where this breaks without Lanes
The usual trade is oversight for locality: cloud agent platforms give you a dashboard by moving execution to their machines, and staying local has meant giving the dashboard up. Lanes keeps the dashboard and the execution in the same app on the same machine, so you never make that trade.
Further reading
- File browser and editor: the project tree and Monaco editor.
- Databases explorer: read-only SQLite queries next to your sessions.
- Git integration: local diffs against the base branch.
- Process manager: every agent process on your machine, visible.
- Trust: how Lanes handles data and security.