What is Quack?
A lightweight desktop code editor with first-class AI — and what it is not.
Quack is a lightweight native desktop code editor (~30 MB, no telemetry) built around running and monitoring multiple AI coding agents at once. The editor is there — files, Monaco, git — but it's the secondary surface. The primary one is the agent list.
Why I built it
The first version of Quack shipped in October 2025, well before Codex, Cursor's agent view, or Claude Desktop looked anything like this. I wrote up the story here: I built a Codex-like app before OpenAI did — now what?
The bet was simple: trust the agents. Give one a ticket, walk away, go work on another project. Don't sit there watching it type.
That first version only spoke to Claude, through the SDK. The models got better and the field got crowded, so Quack opened up — today it drives several providers. That's not a checkbox on a feature list. It means you can work on several fronts and with different tools and different approaches at the same time: Claude on the refactor, something else on the boring migration.
Three things Quack optimizes for, in order: organized, fast, efficient. Everything else follows from those.
Specialized agents
Agents are where "organized" becomes concrete. An agent is a saved setup, not just a model name. Each one carries:
- Instructions — injected the first time you use that agent in a chat
- An effort level — how hard it should think
- A model — specific to the provider you're on
So "Nora the Debugger" isn't a label. It's a real configuration you built once and reuse everywhere.
When a setup feels right, save it. The agent menu has an Update agent slot action that stores the current configuration against the provider you're using.
One provider per session — but you can hand off
A chat runs on one provider at a time. That's a deliberate limit: each CLI keeps its own session memory, and pretending otherwise would quietly lose context.
What you can do is hand off the conversation. The Hand off button sits at the top of the chat's environment panel and moves the thread to another provider, carrying the context across.
Start a plan with one model, hand it to another to implement. Same conversation, different engine.
What Quack is not
- Not just another editor. The file tree and Monaco tabs exist, but you won't spend most of your time there — you'll spend it in the agent list and the chat composer.
- Not tied to one AI backend. Quack drives whichever CLI you already use — Claude Code or Codex — and Claude Code itself can point at Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Z.AI, MiniMax, Kimi, a custom endpoint, or local Ollama models. Bring your own keys.
- Not a cloud product. Everything runs locally on your machine. No remote dashboard, no mobile app, no telemetry.
Who it's for
Anyone already using Claude Code or Codex from a terminal, who wants to run several of them in parallel across several projects without losing track of which one needs attention.