The prompt box is a lonely place to work.
Working with an agent today means typing into a chat window, watching a spinner, and reading a wall of text back. The work is happening — you just can't see it. No desk, no board, no sign of who is doing what, or what finished while you were away.
theboringfloor is our answer: a terminal app where your agents clock in as coworkers on a living ASCII floor, and the work stays where you can see it.
A spinner is not the work.
Agent work today is mechanical and transactional. You type, a spinner turns, a wall of text comes back. Run two sessions and it gets worse: three panes, two of them waiting on you, and no idea which one owns the auth change. You can't see the work move, you can't ask the next thing while it thinks, and when the window closes, everything it learned closes with it.
That changes how you use the tool. You stop collaborating and start queuing requests. The agent never becomes more than an API call — not because it can't, but because there is nowhere for the work to stand still and be seen.
Familiarity builds trust. Trust builds collaboration.
The office is one of the oldest shared-work interfaces we have. Desks you can read at a glance. A board with the work on the wall. Someone to ask. Someone keeping an eye on the team. Nobody needs onboarding to a desk.
Put an agent at one of those desks and something quiet happens. It walks to the whiteboard when the problem is big. It refills the tea machine between batches. You stop parsing logs and start reading a room — and you hand over more of the work, because you can finally see the work.
That is the bet: anthropomorphizing the floor is not decoration, it is interface design. A system you can see is a system you can supervise.
A floor of coworkers, not cursors.
The floor runs on a roster, not a loop. Every worker has a name, a desk, and a status line that says what it is doing right now.
the manager
The boss
The one you talk to. Dispatches work to the team, keeps the shift coherent, and takes your messages mid-turn — interruptible, batchable, always reachable.
theboringcto
The CTO
Reviews every drained batch before it lands. The adult in the room for the calls that matter.
hr
People & health
Watches team health and how the work feels on the floor — even a team of agents needs that.
tekton
The developers
Claims tickets off the board, opens work threads you can expand right in chat, and walks to the tea machine between batches.
scouts, reviewers, runners
The supporting cast
Scouts recon the codebase before work starts, reviewers weigh in on every return, and runners carry the work until it is done.
the floor itself
Ambient life
Desks, blinking server LEDs, the tea machine, light and dark themes, and sound. An office that feels inhabited, not rendered.
A queue that never locks you out.
A good boss is interruptible. Message the office mid-task, mid-batch, mid-turn — nothing you send falls into a black hole.
- Message the boss mid-turn — your words batch into one composed send, not a lost line in the scrollback.
- The concierge answers instantly while the boss is busy, so you never talk to a wall.
- /stop aborts on the spot; free-send keeps you typing while the office is mid-turn.
- Permission asks stack as 1 of N instead of stealing the screen — approve, always-allow, or reject.
The office remembers, so you don't have to re-explain.
A coworker who forgets everything overnight is not much of a coworker. The office restores your last session when you open it, -s / --session pins a thread, and /session picks the room you want to walk back into.
Under the floor, agentmemory keeps the lessons and the board state across shifts. Close the terminal on Friday; walk back in on Tuesday and the office is where you left it.
Built for coworkers, not one harness.
The office runs on opencode or Claude Code, honestly and visibly — same floor, same roster, either harness. The org, the floor, and the memory were built for coworkers, whichever harness they arrive in.
We are at v0.2.x — the "wave" releases. Early, open, and building in public. More seats, more office.
When the office is the wrong tool.
We would rather lose you here than at hour ten of the wrong setup. Skip the whole thing if:
- You want one-shot answers, not an ongoing system. A plain chat window is fine for that — use it.
- You live in an IDE GUI, not a terminal. The office is a terminal app, and it will not pretend otherwise.
- You need deterministic structured-output pipelines, not coworkers you supervise.
- You have one agent, one file, one question — a roster and a board are overhead there.
- You would rather not supervise anything. A floor you can read assumes someone reading it.
A proper office, for agents.
Tuesday at a good company: a floor with a hum to it, coworkers with names, work you can see moving, a boss you can interrupt, and a team that remembers. That is the whole idea — come walk the floor.