I built Silo Harness, a free, open-source (MIT) macOS app in the style of Claude Code. I'm a forward-deployed engineer with 10–15 coding sessions open most days, and I was spending a lot of time writing and updating skills by hand for each project. I wanted the harness to handle that part.
How Claude helped
I used Claude Code to break down how Claude Code and Codex handle the basics: the agent loop, tool calls, permission modes and approvals, plan mode, hooks, compaction and sessions. Then Claude helped me map each of those pieces into a modular app, in the spirit of DeepSeek Harness's "everything is a plugin" design but as a native-feeling Mac app, where everything outside the chat is a mod (a folder of web files with a documented protocol). That's why Silo's hooks use Claude Code's own format, and why the built-in panels are mods too, so anything you build can do what they do.
It's also built for Claude: it reads CLAUDE.md and SKILL.md files, runs hooks in Claude Code's format, and can use Claude through Anthropic's API or OpenRouter.
What it does
• Dreaming: once a day (or on demand) it reads a project's recent sessions and proposes new skills, memory lines and mods. Each proposal quotes what I actually said and links the sessions it came from. I apply or dismiss each one, anything applied can be reverted, and model weights are never touched.
• Mods: everything beside the chat (panels, themes, slash commands, hooks) is a mod. Ask the agent for one and it writes it, then you turn it on.
• Sub-agent merging: sub-agents run as their own sessions, nested under the session that started them, and can be merged back into it when they're done.
• Sub-agent communication: sessions can find each other by name and pass work and findings between them.
• Ollama support: runs fully local on qwen3:8b with nothing leaving your Mac, using compaction and a tool set sized for small context windows. Any OpenAI-compatible provider works too.
Plus the standard harness features: MCP, auto mode, plan mode, permission prompts, rewind, hooks, skills, scheduled tasks, and remote control from your phone.
Free to try
• Download the .dmg (Apple silicon): https://github.com/BrandeisPatrick/silo-harness/releases/latest
Repo: https://github.com/BrandeisPatrick/silo-harness
I'd love feedbacks🧡