Fair
questions.
The short answers. The field guide has the long ones, and Security & trust has the careful ones.
The basics
What is Project Pals?
A layout, a set of mods and a pal command for Herdr. Each Herdr space becomes a pal, a project with a brain; its tabs are channels, each the agent's own terminal. A head pal hires, assigns and checks in, and you approve anything that leaves your machine.
Do I need Herdr?
Yes. Herdr runs the terminals and agents; Project Pals is a layer on top. Install Herdr and open it once before installing Project Pals.
Is it free?
Yes. It's open source under the MIT license. Your agents' own subscriptions or API costs are yours as usual.
Which agents work?
Claude Code is tested daily, with hooks, the approval gate and its status line. Codex is tested as a pal. Grok CLI, Gemini CLI, opencode, Hermes and others work as terminal pals, without hooks or the gate. Native Antigravity CLI support is coming in 0.3.1. Reports from other harnesses are welcome.
Channels or topics?
In 0.3.0 a pal's tabs are channels. From 0.3.1 they're called topics Coming in 0.3.1, since they're the topics a pal is working on; pal channel and --channel keep working.
Platforms
Does it run on macOS or Windows?
Not yet. The background helper is a systemd user service, so it's Linux only for now. macOS support is planned.
What if I don't have a systemd user session?
The install still works, but the helper is skipped: messages are typed in directly, and routines and callbacks don't run. The same goes for WSL or containers without one.
Safety
Is the approval gate a sandbox?
No. It holds the commands that leave your machine (pushes, merges, releases, deploys) for Claude Code pals until you click. A pal with permissions bypassed can still edit files. What it does and doesn't do →
Can a pal approve something for me?
No. Only your click in the Inbox approves, and a message from another pal, the head pal included, is never approval.
Does it send my code anywhere?
Your agents talk to their providers as usual. Memory reviews send channel screens to Claude (Haiku) to distil what's worth remembering. Updates come only from the project's GitHub releases.
Updates
Will an update touch my pals?
No. Updates replace only Project Pals' own files: your pals, rooms, memory, routines and tasks stay put. The previous version is kept for Roll back.
How do I uninstall?
There's no uninstaller yet. Switch Herdr to another layout, run systemctl --user disable --now herdr-crew.service, remove the files listed on Security & trust, and put back ~/.claude/settings.json from the copy in ~/.config/herdr-app/.crew-backups/.
The pets
Can I change my pal's pet?
Yes: right-click a pal and choose Customize look. Pick its species, colour, up to two things it wears and its eyes, with a live preview of every state. All the options →
Who made the pets?
They're drawn by Project Pals' own pocket-pet engine: every pal is a set of round LEDs on a fixed hex grid, so the dots never move when the pal does.