CadenceDocs

Cadence v0.5.3 · Documentation

Introduction

Cadence is a native macOS app that sits between you and your coding agents, so you can run many of them without keeping any of them waiting.

Every question and finished task lands in one Inbox. Answer in a keystroke, or just talk.

Cadence is free. There is no account and no subscription.

What it does

  • Toolbar. A thin strip on the edge of your screen with one dot per agent. Blue is working, amber needs you, green is done.
  • Inbox. Questions, plan approvals and tool permission requests from every agent, plus finished work with a short recap. Press 1 to 9 to answer, J and K to move between cards.
  • Talk. Double-tap ⌥, then say or type what you need. Cadence sends it to the agent already on that work, starts a new one, or hands a question to the Director.
  • Director. A Claude session that can see every agent and can message, start, check on and stop them for you.
  • Any CLI. Claude Code runs natively inside Cadence. Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Amp, Grok, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini and others run in terminals through herdr.
  • Dictation anywhere. Hold ⌥ to type into any app. Speech recognition runs on your Mac.

How it fits together

Agents do the work. Cadence watches them, collects what they need from you, and gets your answer back to the right one.

  1. You start agents from the toolbar, from Talk, or from the Director.
  2. Each agent gets a short title written by Claude Haiku, so you can tell them apart.
  3. When an agent asks something or finishes, its dot changes color and a card lands in the Inbox.
  4. You answer with a number key, a typed reply, or your voice.

Routing, titles, recaps and the Director use Claude through your own Claude Code login. Audio and dictation stay on your Mac. See Privacy for the details.

Where to start