BossConsole

🔬 The operator's console for AI agents — and the scientists who direct them

The first open-source, multi-platform harness for AI agents — an evolvable toolbox for agents and the humans they work with.

🧪 Built for enterprises, science, and research.

⚡ Natively multi-threaded — built on the JVM, not Electron — with live hot-reload and laptop-to-supercomputer scale.

Bring your own agent — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or OpenCode — and give it a real browser, terminal, editor, secrets, and automation. Then decide exactly what each one is allowed to touch. Run it on your own machine, hand a live terminal to your phone with a QR code, and reshape any tool — by hand or by the agent itself — while the app keeps running.

⬇ Download · 📊 Compare · 🤖 Run an agent · 🔐 Governance · 🧰 Toolbox · 🖥️ BossTerm

Just want to download BOSS? Head to BossConsole-Releases for pre-built installers.

Built with Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform, BOSS unifies an embedded browser, a blazing-fast shareable terminal, a code editor, an extensible Toolbox of plugins, and a governed MCP tool layer into one desktop workspace for complex, AI-assisted work.

How BOSS compares

Every other AI-agent desktop app and agentic IDE — Claude Desktop, OpenAI Codex, Google Antigravity, Cursor, and Windsurf/Devin — is closed source, and most lock you to a single vendor's model. BOSS is the first open-source, multi-platform harness in the category: Apache-2.0, cross-platform, and built to run any agent.

The deeper difference: BOSS is both the agent's home and an agent-operable app. The same MCP layer your agent uses to do work also exposes BOSS itself — its tabs, terminals, browser, editor, git, secrets, and automation — as 100+ mcp__boss__* tools. Read-only tools (list tabs, read a pane's output, tail the console, snapshot performance, inspect git) give an agent live situational awareness of the workspace; action tools let it act on what it finds. So the agent doesn't just chat about your code — it perceives the running app and drives it, carrying out multi-step tasks autonomously.

And unlike most of the field, BOSS bundles a real embedded browser — Fluck — the agent can navigate, script, and automate (browser_navigate, browser_run_js, plus record-and-replay RPA), with logins filled from the Secret Manager and never handed to the model.

It's also native, not Electron. BOSS runs on the JVM with true multithreading and hot-reloads plugins at runtime — so an agent can evolve a tool and see it live, without restarting the app — while Claude Desktop and the VS Code-fork IDEs (Antigravity, Cursor, Windsurf/Devin) run on a single-threaded JavaScript event loop.

_{✅ yes · △ partial/limited · ❌ no.  ¹ Only OpenAI's Codex CLI is open source (Apache-2.0); the Codex desktop app is proprietary.  ² Claude Desktop's "Computer Use" controls the whole screen rather than bundling a scriptable in-app browser.  ³ Enterprise-plan admin controls exist, but fine-grained per-tool RBAC isn't documented.  ⁴ Codex CLI is cross-platform; the desktop app is macOS/Windows.  ⁵ VS Code-fork IDEs reload extensions via a full window reload; none offers BOSS-style live plugin hot-reload + agent-driven tool evolution.  ⁶ Claude Desktop and the VS Code-fork IDEs run on Electron (Chromium + Node.js) — a single-threaded JavaScript event loop with worker/child-process offloading; BOSS runs natively on the JVM with true multithreading.  Compiled from public sources, July 2026 — these products move fast, so corrections are welcome via issue or PR.}

Contents

• How BOSS compares
• Downloads
• Why BOSS
• Run any AI coding agent
• You decide what your agents can touch
• MCP — give agents real tools
• Toolbox — an app store inside the app
• BossTerm — a terminal you can share to any device
• Case study: the DNA Origami Inventor
• Design System
• Development
• CLI · CI/CD · Documentation · Open source & ecosystem

Downloads

Download links always fetch the newest release directly (via the latest-release edge function; the saved file keeps its versioned name). Release metadata as JSON — version, assets, sha256 checksums — is at ?app=boss. To browse all versions, see BossConsole-Releases.

Quick Install

# macOS (Homebrew — Recommended)
brew install --cask boss

# macOS/Linux (Universal Script)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/risa-labs-inc/BossConsole-Releases/main/install.sh | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/risa-labs-inc/BossConsole-Releases/main/install.ps1 | iex

Why BOSS

• 🤖 Bring your own agent — run Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or OpenCode in a BOSS terminal and give them a real toolset (browser, files, git, shell, secrets, automation) over MCP.
• 🧰 Extensible by design — a built-in Toolbox plugin store; the terminal, editor, and browser are themselves hot-loadable plugins, and you can scaffold your own with an AI agent.
• 🔐 You stay in control — server-enforced role-based access control, a per-user kill-switch for every agent tool, and user-scoped secrets. You decide exactly what an agent can call.
• 🖥️ A terminal built to share — hand a live terminal session to your phone via QR, or to a teammate over an end-to-end-encrypted link, with view-only or full control.
• ⚡ Fast and native — Compose Multiplatform desktop app with the built-in Fluck browser, on macOS, Windows, and Linux (x64 + ARM64).
• ⚙️ Multi-threaded, built to scale — truly multi-threaded on the JVM (not a single-threaded Electron/JS event loop), with an out-of-process microkernel architecture engineered to run from a laptop to a supercomputer.

Run any AI coding agent

BOSS is agent-agnostic. Open a terminal, launch your preferred CLI, and — once attached — it gains the boss toolset automatically.

How it works: the terminal-tab plugin runs a small loopback MCP server named boss. You attach a CLI once (one click from Toolbox → MCP, or the BossTerm AI menu); BOSS then re-attaches it automatically on every restart and port change, and injects BOSS_MCP_PORT into each terminal so an agent launched inside BOSS always dials the right instance. If a CLI isn't scriptable, BOSS copies a ready-to-paste config snippet to your clipboard.

Scaffold a tool for any of them — the built-in Tool Creator generates a new plugin (build files, manifest, skeleton UI, CI) and writes its skill in all four CLI formats (.claude/, .codex/, .gemini/, .opencode/), so the repo works with whichever agent you open it with — then launches that agent in a fresh terminal to start building.

A tool-creation framework for a reinforcement layer. Together, Tool Creator and its companion Tool Evolver let an agent build and continuously improve its own capabilities: scaffold a tool, probe how it behaves (memory, leaks, logs, output), then evolve it — hot-reloaded into the running app and opened as a PR. Tools are created, measured, and reinforced in a loop, so the toolbox gets better with use.

You decide what your agents can touch

An agent with tools is only as safe as the controls around it. BOSS is a governed environment for tool-using agents — not a black box.

• Server-enforced RBAC. Roles and permissions live in Postgres and are enforced server-side via row-level security (Supabase). Plugins declare the permissions they need; a plugin — and its tools — only appear for users whose role grants them. See the RBAC Guide.
• A kill-switch for every tool. Every mcp__boss__* tool an agent can call is listed in Toolbox → MCP, and you can toggle any of them off. The exposed set is all tools − your disabled set − permission-denied, persisted to ~/.boss/mcp-disabled-tools.json and enforced on the live server. Disable a plugin and its tools vanish from every agent instantly.
• User-scoped secrets. The Secret Manager stores encrypted credentials that are row-level-scoped to you. Its browser auto-fill injects a username/password straight into a web page's form fields — the value goes to the page, never to the model. (A secret is handed to an agent only if you explicitly call the permission-gated secret_get tool, which you can also toggle off.)
• Signed plugins. Plugins installed from the BOSS Plugin Store carry a store signature binding pluginId | version | sha256; a tampered or invalid signature fails closed at download and load time — a re-signed or swapped JAR won't load.
• Fault isolation. Each plugin runs in a supervised scope with a watchdog and auto-restart, so a crashing or hung plugin can't take down the host.

Honest scope: the boss MCP server is loopback-only and single-user (local machine), and plugins run in-process (crash-isolated, not OS-sandboxed). BOSS's guarantees are about governance — RBAC, per-tool toggles, secret scoping, and signed plugins — giving you fine-grained say over what an agent can do, rather than OS-level process sandboxing.

MCP — give agents real tools

BOSS speaks the Model Context Protocol. The terminal-tab plugin hosts a loopback boss server (SSE over HTTP, 127.0.0.1:7677, with a fallback port walk), and every active plugin contributes tools that surface to agents as mcp__boss__<tool> — roughly 100+ tools across ~20 plugins, appearing and disappearing automatically as plugins load. A sampling:

Plugin authors add tools by implementing McpToolProvider (boss-plugin-api 1.0.51+). Full reference: PLUGIN_DEVELOPMENT.md in boss-plugins.

Toolbox — an app store inside the app

Toolbox is BOSS's built-in plugin store (a left-sidebar panel; internally the plugin-manager system plugin). Browse, install, update, and enable/disable plugins; toggle individual MCP tools; and — for admins — Create new plugins with an AI agent via Tool Creator. Plugins are hot-loaded at runtime and live in the separate boss-plugins repo.

Core tabs

Dev tools

AI & automation

Security & secrets

Productivity & admin

…and more in boss-plugins, including analytics, atlas (chat about the current page), and hardware integrations.

BossTerm — a terminal you can share to any device

The terminal is powered by BossTerm — a fast, embeddable terminal emulator (also published to Maven Central as com.risaboss:bossterm-compose). Its headline feature: session sharing.

Share a live session — to your phone or a teammate

Your machine is the server: BossTerm runs a small embedded web server and streams the session to an xterm.js viewer over a WebSocket — no cloud relay, no account.

• Scan a QR code with your phone → the session opens in any mobile browser (nothing to install), touch-tuned with an on-screen key bar, drag-to-scroll, and pinch-zoom.
• Two links, two QR codes: a View link (read-only) and a Control link (full typing access). A view-only viewer can request control mid-session; you approve it.
• Share a tab, a window, or all windows — splits are preserved (they collapse into swipeable sub-tabs on a phone).
• Multiple people at once: send someone the link, or have another BossTerm "add remote" to mirror your tabs as first-class remote tabs — with control requests relayed hop-by-hop, each host approving in turn.
• End-to-end encrypted: a per-share key rides in the URL fragment (never sent to any server), and each connection derives a fresh AES-256-GCM key via HKDF-SHA256; both ends show a short verification code. Public tunnels can't read your session.
• Reach it anywhere: LAN by default, or a public link via Cloudflare (the default — BossTerm fetches cloudflared for you, no account) or Tailscale.

More BossTerm features

• Drive it with AI — an in-process MCP server exposes the terminal to agents; a phone or second machine can even point an AI client at the host's terminals.
• Inline images in the terminal (iTerm2 OSC 1337), true color, full Unicode/emoji, Nerd Fonts, OSC 52 clipboard, and shell integration.
• Split panes & multiple windows, per-pane titles, regex search, command-complete notifications.
• Optional session daemon (tmux-style) with a tray icon, so sessions, shares, and the MCP server survive closing the GUI.

Case study: the DNA Origami Inventor

BOSS isn't only for shipping software. 🧬 DNA Origami Inventor is a BOSS plugin for computational nanotechnology: a researcher describes a target nanostructure in a chat-first UI, and an agent designs the DNA origami and runs oxDNA molecular-dynamics simulations to validate it — orchestrating BOSS's terminal, editor, browser, and tools end to end.

It's a concrete example of what BOSS is built for beyond coding: enterprises, science, and research — domains where an agent needs real tools, real compute, and governed access, not just a chat window.

Design System

BOSS and BossTerm share one visual language — "Operator's Console": an amber signal (#F2A93B) for what's live on a calm ink floor (#0E1217), cyan data accents, and a MesloLGS mono voice. The whole app re-skins live across three themes — Operator (dark), Daylight (light), and Clean (neutral) — and every dynamic plugin follows along.

• 📖 Design System spec — tokens, themes, and where they ship in code
• 🎨 Visual styleguide — a self-contained HTML reference (open it in a browser)

Development

This repository contains the source code for BOSS. For building from source and contributing, follow the instructions below.

Prerequisites

• JDK 17+ (recommended: Azul Zulu or Oracle JDK)
• Gradle 8.x (wrapper included)

Build Commands

./gradlew run                    # Run desktop application
./gradlew showVersion            # Display current version
./gradlew test                   # Run tests
./gradlew build                  # Build application
./gradlew packageDmg             # Build macOS DMG
./gradlew packageMsi             # Build Windows MSI
./gradlew packageDistributionForCurrentOS  # Build for current platform

Project Structure

/composeApp        # Main Compose Multiplatform UI application
  /commonMain      # Cross-platform shared code
  /desktopMain     # Desktop-specific code (JVM)
/plugin-platform   # Host-side plugin platform: loader, repository, SDK modules
/modules           # Microkernel / out-of-process architecture (boss-ipc, boss-ui-sdk, …)
/server            # Minimal Ktor server component
/supabase          # Database migrations and Edge Functions
/docs              # Documentation

The dynamic plugins themselves (terminal, editor, browser, Toolbox, …) live in the separate boss-plugins repo. BossEditor and BossTerm are standalone libraries bundled inside the editor-tab and terminal-tab plugins respectively.

Configuration

Create local.properties in the project root:

# JxBrowser (required to run the embedded browser)
jxbrowser.license.key=<your-license-key>

# Supabase (required for auth / backend)
SUPABASE_URL=https://api.risaboss.com
SUPABASE_ANON_KEY=<anon-key>
SUPABASE_FUNCTION_URL=https://api.risaboss.com/functions/v1

# GitHub (optional — 60 req/hr without)
GITHUB_TOKEN=ghp_your_token_here

Resolution order: environment variables → system properties → local.properties → build-time embedded config. There are no credential fallbacks in source; official builds embed these at build time from CI secrets, and a fork without keys still builds (browser/auth features degrade with a clear log).

Key Technologies

• Kotlin Multiplatform + Compose Multiplatform
• Fluck — BOSS's built-in browser (JxBrowser 9.x engine)
• Decompose for navigation
• Supabase + Edge Functions for backend and RBAC
• BossTerm for terminal integration (also hosts the boss MCP server)
• MCP (Model Context Protocol) for exposing plugin tools to in-terminal AI agents
• kotlin-compiler-embeddable for PSI code analysis

Version Management

./gradlew showVersion       # Display current version
./gradlew incrementVersion  # Increment patch (9.2.0 → 9.2.1)
./gradlew incrementMinor    # Increment minor (9.2.0 → 9.3.0)
./gradlew incrementMajor    # Increment major (9.2.0 → 10.0.0)

All version info is stored in version.properties.

CI/CD

Releases build and sign for all platforms (macOS, Windows, Linux × x64/ARM64), notarize on macOS, and publish to the BOSS Plugin Store and Maven Central. Release-capable workflows are gated behind an owner-approved GitHub environment.

Cutting a release: Actions → Release Build → Run workflow (pick a version bump), then approve the release environment prompt.

CLI

BOSS includes a command-line interface for quick access:

boss url https://github.com    # Open a URL in a browser tab
boss folder ~/Documents        # Open a folder
boss file README.md            # Open a file in the editor
boss terminal                  # Open a terminal
boss plugin bookmarks          # Open a plugin panel
boss --help                    # Show help

Installation: Toolbox / Tools → Install BOSS CLI (or automatically via Homebrew).

Documentation

• Core Subsystems — Auth, UI, keyboard shortcuts, threading
• Design System — "Operator's Console" tokens, themes, and the live styleguide
• BossEditor Module — LSP, PSI, editor features
• Application Features — Performance monitoring, dashboard, downloads
• Keyboard Shortcuts — Detailed shortcuts reference
• RBAC Guide — Role-based access control
• Plugin System — Host-side plugin platform / SDK
• Plugin Development & MCP — Writing plugins, the manifest, RBAC, and exposing mcp__boss__* tools

Open source & ecosystem

BOSS is developed in the open, end to end — the host app, the plugin platform, the terminal, and every tool is its own public repository.

Core & libraries

• BossConsole — the host app (this repo)
• boss-plugins — plugin umbrella + the Plugin Development & MCP guide
• boss-plugin-api — the plugin API contract
• boss-microkernel-runtime — out-of-process plugin runtime
• BossTerm — the terminal library (com.risaboss:bossterm-compose)

Plugins — each is its own repo:

• Tabs — terminal-tab · editor-tab · fluck-browser
• Dev tools — codebase · console · git-status · git-log · run-configurations · performance
• AI & automation — tool-creator · tool-evolver · llmrpa · rpaengine · rparecorder
• Security — secret-manager · user-secret-list
• Productivity — bookmarks · downloads · topofmind
• Admin — admin-role-management · role-creation

Releases — BossConsole-Releases hosts the pre-built installers for every platform.

Support

• Issues: GitHub Issues
• Releases: BossConsole-Releases
• Enterprise: enterprise@risalabs.ai
• Website: risalabs.ai

© 2025 Risa Labs Inc. Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.