Roadmap
The aim: your agents run on your own machines, keep running whatever happens to the window, and you can see, answer and direct them from wherever you are, without Alto becoming one more dashboard to tend.
The terminal itself; sessions outliving the window; several clients per session; the background service and keep-awake; upgrades that keep sessions (alto reload); agent status, marks and notifications; coming back after a reboot; reaching other devices from the command line, in tabs and in Settings, with no pairing for your own devices; slow links; working beside an agent (work panes, alto run, who’s typing, alto mcp).
macOS is used daily. Linux builds and passes every test; its window is checked less. Windows builds and passes its tests in CI on a real machine, with window checks by hand.
Agents that run agents Planned · Phase 7
Section titled “Agents that run agents Planned · Phase 7”A boss is just a session whose agent has tools to start other sessions, hand them tasks and hear back; a boss can have bosses under it. The work is a tree of tasks kept on disk as markdown, one writer per file (the boss writes the brief, the worker its progress and result), so nothing needs merging and everything survives a restart.
Alto never plans or splits up work. It keeps the record, wakes an idle agent when a message arrives, rolls progress up the tree (“3 of 5 done, 1 needs you”), and enforces who may read, type into, start or stop which session. Permission prompts stay with you unless you hand them to a boss.
Your phone as a real client Planned · Phase 6
Section titled “Your phone as a real client Planned · Phase 6”Native iPhone and Android apps over the same Rust core and protocol. See Remote access with Tailscale.
- Agents in a box, per session Planned · Phase 7: a session fenced by the operating system’s own sandbox (files and network limited, starting instantly), or in a small virtual machine, chosen per session or per role.
- Updates you don’t notice Planned · Phase 8: the app updates itself, the service follows, and sessions on macOS and Linux move to the new build in place.
- Packages Soon: Homebrew first.
- Open source Planned · Phase 8, most likely GPL-3.0.
Not planned
Section titled “Not planned”Kept deliberately small: no repo, worktree or browser panels; no planning or scheduling logic of its own (agents do that); no syncing with issue trackers. Any of these comes only if real use shows a need.
If needed later: a relay for reaching sessions without Tailscale, attaching to tmux on servers that only have tmux, and a tmux stand-in for agent tools that open panes with tmux commands.