helix

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Helix — a private agent fleet with spec-driven coding

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Run a fleet of coding agents on your own infrastructure. Each agent gets its own GPU-accelerated desktop; you organize the work on a spec-driven Kanban board and review the pull requests.

It's about running agents on the server, not on every developer's laptop. You already run Claude Code (or Codex, or Gemini) locally: one agent, one terminal, tied to your machine and your attention. You wouldn't hire a team of developers and sit them all at one laptop — so why make your agents share one? Helix gives each agent its own computer.

Helix runs those agents as a fleet — many in parallel, each in its own isolated sandbox with a full desktop (browser, terminal, filesystem, GUI apps), on your own infrastructure, shared with your team. You describe an outcome as a spec task, an agent plans it, you approve the plan, and it implements the change and opens a pull request. Instead of one person babysitting one agent in one terminal, you and your team collaboratively dispatch, steer, and review many from a shared Kanban board.

It runs with the agent harnesses you already use (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Qwen Code, or any ACP-compatible agent) against the LLM providers you already use — including self-hosted models on your own GPUs. Self-hostable end to end, including air-gapped.

Yes, this is meta: the task that produced this README is the "New SpecTask" open on the right.

Projects & the Kanban board

Work lives in projects. Each project connects one or more git repositories and has a Kanban board where spec tasks move left to right:

Backlog → Planning → Spec Review → In Progress → Pull Request → Merged

1. Backlog — Create a task with a one-paragraph description of the outcome you want (what should be true when done, not how to do it).
2. Planning — Click Start Planning. A planning agent reads the repo and writes a spec (requirements, design, task breakdown) to a helix-specs branch.
3. Spec Review — Read the plan. Highlight text to request changes and the agent re-plans, or Approve to commit to it.
4. In Progress — An implementation agent codes in its own isolated desktop sandbox. Watch it live, type into the task thread to steer it, or switch to a different agent mid-session — the new one picks up where the last left off.
5. Pull Request — When it's done, a PR is opened in your repo. The PR is the real review gate.
6. Merged — The task closes when the PR merges.

Tasks run in parallel — each in its own sandbox — so you're not waiting for one to finish before starting the next. Per-column WIP limits keep the board honest. See Manage your backlog on the Kanban board.

Why Helix is different

• A full desktop per agent — not just a terminal. Every agent gets a GPU-accelerated streaming desktop with a browser, terminal, filesystem, and GUI apps. You can watch any agent work in real time.
• Fleet visibility. See every running agent from a dashboard, zoom into any one's live screen, and jump in with pair programming when it gets stuck.
• Multiplayer. Agent environments are shared. Teammates across time zones open the same task and keep going — full chat history and running state persist, no handoff summaries.
• High-density isolation. Many fully isolated agent desktops run on a single machine, with a deduplicated filesystem and per-agent credential and network isolation.
• No lock-in, and cheaper runs. Swap agent harnesses per task and point Helix at whatever models you run. Because context carries across the switch, you can start a task on a cheap local model and escalate to an expensive one only when it's actually needed — instead of paying frontier prices for the whole run.

Works with your stack (no lock-in)

Agent harnesses — use any of these per task, and swap between them mid-task:

• Claude Code
• OpenAI Codex
• Gemini CLI
• Qwen Code
• Goose
• Zed Agent
• Anything that speaks ACP (Agent Client Protocol)

Source control — connect your repositories and Helix opens pull requests where your code already lives:

• GitHub
• GitLab
• Azure DevOps

LLM providers — hosted or self-hosted:

• Major hosted providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, …)
• Anthropic via Helix's proxy, including Anthropic on Google Vertex AI and Anthropic on AWS Bedrock
• Self-hosted models — attach any OpenAI-compatible endpoint as an external provider. This includes vLLM: point Helix at your vLLM server's OpenAI-compatible URL and run open models on your own GPUs, on Kubernetes or bare metal, air-gapped if you need to.

Also included

Helix is a full private GenAI stack, so the pieces you'd expect are here too:

• Knowledge / RAG — document ingestion (PDF, Word, text), a web scraper, multiple RAG backends (Kodit, LlamaIndex), PGVector embeddings, and vision RAG.
• Skills & tools — REST/OpenAPI integrations, MCP server compatibility, GPTScript, OAuth token management, and a custom-tool SDK.
• Tracing & observability — every agent step, requests/responses to LLMs, APIs, and MCP servers, token usage, and cost analysis.
• Multi-tenancy & auth — organizations, teams, and role-based access control, with OIDC single sign-on.
• Billing & metering — track token usage and spend per user and per team, so you can see where the budget goes.
• Automation — scheduled/cron tasks and webhook triggers.
• Notifications — Slack, Discord, and email.

Quick Start

Install on Docker

Use our quickstart installer:

curl -sL -O https://get.helixml.tech/install.sh
chmod +x install.sh
sudo ./install.sh

The installer will prompt you before making changes to your system. By default, the dashboard will be available on http://localhost:8080.

For setting up a deployment with a DNS name, see ./install.sh --help or read the detailed docs. We've documented easy TLS termination for you.

Next steps:

• Attach your own GPU runners per runners docs
• Use any external OpenAI-compatible LLM (including self-hosted vLLM)

Install on Kubernetes

Use our Helm charts for production deployments:

• Control Plane Helm Chart
• Runner Helm Chart

Configuration

All server configuration is done via environment variables. You can find the complete list of configuration options in api/pkg/config/config.go.

Key environment variables:

• OPENAI_API_KEY - OpenAI API credentials
• ANTHROPIC_API_KEY - Anthropic API credentials
• POSTGRES_* - Database connection settings
• SERVER_URL - Public URL for the deployment
• RUNNER_* - GPU runner configuration

See the configuration documentation for detailed setup instructions.

‍ Development

For local development, refer to the Helix local development guide.

Prerequisites:

• Docker Desktop (or Docker + Docker Compose)
• Go 1.24.0+
• Node.js 18+
• Make

Quick development setup:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/helixml/helix.git
cd helix

# Start supporting services
docker-compose up -d postgres

# Run the backend
cd api
go run . serve

# Run the frontend (in a new terminal)
cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev

See local-development.md for comprehensive setup instructions.

Documentation

• Overview - Platform introduction
• Getting Started - Build your first agent
• Manage your backlog on the Kanban board - Projects and spec tasks
• Control Plane Deployment - Production deployment guide
• Runner Deployment - GPU runner setup
• API Reference - REST API documentation
• Contributing Guide - How to contribute
• Upgrading Guide - Control plane upgrade instructions

Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please see our Contributing Guide for details.

By contributing, you confirm that:

• Your changes will fall under the same license
• Your changes will be owned by HelixML, Inc.

License

Helix is licensed under a similar license to Docker Desktop. You can run the source code (in this repo) for free for:

• Personal Use: Individuals or people personally experimenting
• Educational Use: Schools and universities
• Small Business Use: Companies with under $10M annual revenue and less than 250 employees

If you fall outside of these terms, please use the Launchpad to purchase a license for large commercial use. Trial licenses are available for experimentation.

You are not allowed to use our code to build a product that competes with us.

Why these license clauses?

• We generate revenue to support the development of Helix. We are an independent software company.
• We don't want cloud providers to take our open source code and build a rebranded service on top of it.

If you would like to use some part of this code under a more permissive license, please get in touch.

Support

• Discord Community - Join our community for help and discussions
• GitHub Issues - Report bugs or request features
• Documentation - Comprehensive guides and references
• Email - Contact us for commercial inquiries

Star History

If you find Helix useful, please consider giving us a star on GitHub!

Built with ❤️ by HelixML, Inc.