An orphan is not necessarily sick.
A missing parent proves less than it seems. A live session can still be using a reparented server. One more test kept faro from closing work three agents needed.
Local control plane · eleven tools · one office
Your agents are the ships. You are the port.
Small tools that coordinate what coding agents can reach, spend, say and leave running on one machine. Local-first, observable and quiet by design.
- macOS
- Python 3.11+
- stdlib only
- no telemetry
01 / Why Porto exists
Every agent can be right while the machine still sinks.
Four agents were open on a 16 GB laptop, one per project. Each chose, reasonably and independently, to start something big. None could see the others. Nothing was broken. Nobody was counting.
14.3 GBswap in use before anything looked wrong
10.5 hwaiting; then 63 seconds once there was room
20 hthe oldest orphaned preview server
3.5 Moutput tokens in one uncounted day
02 / The fleet
Thirteen tools. One harbour office.
Each one was built the day a real resource ran out. They count, limit and show. They never take the work away from the agents.
What is held back
paratia bulkhead
Keeps sensitive files inside an encrypted sparsebundle, then guards the mount at the kernel boundary.
founded on the harbour floor
varo launch
Ships static sites, then checks the live copy. Its auditor is held read-only by the harness.
banchina quay
Finds the local webservers already running on the machine, keeps them in one window and stops each with a switch.
founded on the harbour floor
What gets spent
rada anchorage
An admission queue for heavy jobs. A model decides who goes first because arrival order cannot.
darsena dock basin
A berth register for simulators, phones and build directories. One session holds a thing; the rest are told who has it.
not published yet
faro lighthouse
One board for everything running in the background, read from the source that owns it.
founded on the harbour floor
What gets said
boa mooring buoy
The blackboard every session sees, where models write on purpose instead of a collector guessing.
plancia bridge
One board for the work you do with AI. Claude Code and Codex already record it; this reads both.
reflip the coin again
Rewrites text until a statistical watermark stops registering, and prints what the detector said before and after.
What moves between
03 / Field notes
Built from incidents, not imagined workflows.
Never date a scheduled job by its log.
Quiet jobs do not touch their logs. launchd counts real runs, so Porto shows the count from the system that owns it—not an inference from stale text.
The frame turned on its author.
boa labels relayed text as data, never instruction. When its own author later sent an instruction through it, the receiving agent refused. The boundary held.
A queue can synchronise the crash it was meant to prevent.
Two sessions, two iOS builds. rada held one build and one simctl shutdown all until memory was free, then admitted both in the same second. Counting memory was right and not enough: a simulator is not a quantity you wait for, it is a name somebody already has.
04 / Come aboard
Start with the two that pay back on day one.
Each tool stands alone. Install the whole suite only when you want the whole harbour.
# see what is running on your behalf
pipx install git+https://github.com/nerln/faro
faro
# then open the office for the whole port
pipx install git+https://github.com/nerln/capitaneria
capitaneria
The same line works for boa, plancia, dogana, paratia, vedetta and rada.
Or install.sh in this repository installs all eight commands at once.