Features · Control Deck

The deck

Decks & cards

A deck is a spatial workspace you own. Agents, shells, previews, and notes all live on it as cards you can place, resize, and command.

A deck for every project

Make as many decks as you like, one per project or line of work.
Each deck keeps its own cards, layout, background, and agents.
Switch context by switching decks. Agents keep running when you leave.

Card types

Agent cards run an AI coding CLI as a full terminal.
Shell cards for plain native terminals.
Preview cards for a live browser of a dev server.
Kanban, notes, media, and Git cards hold the rest of the work.

Layouts and focus

Re-tile the deck from a free grid to clean columns.
Focus a single card when one agent needs your full attention.
Zoom stays crisp because the canvas re-renders at the new density.

Orchestration

Commanders & workers

Commanders are full agents first. They can take normal jobs like any other card, and they can also delegate work to workers when you want a job to fan out.

Roles

A commander is a normal agent that can also break work into pieces and hand them off.
Workers pick those pieces up and build in parallel when you use dispatch.
Every agent can see who else is running and what state they are in.

Dispatch externally

Workers spawn as their own live cards on the deck.
Approve pending sub-agents from the shelf at the top.
Take over any card mid-flight.

Dispatch internally

Keep delegation inside the commander's own CLI.
The deck stays quiet while work still fans out under one card.
Mode is set per commander in Settings.

Concurrency and approvals

Cap workers at 1 to 24 per commander.
Auto-approve them, or require sign-off first.
An edge tab flags when a worker finishes or blocks.

Agents & tools

Providers & MCP

Control Deck does not ship its own model. It commands the agent CLIs you already run, and gives them a shared tool layer through MCP.

Supported agent CLIs

Claude, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Antigravity, Hermes, and Grok out of the box.
Plus native shell cards for everything else.
It commands the CLIs you already have. It does not replace them.

Honest provider state

Each provider shows as installed, signed in, or not detected.
Nothing is marked ready until the path is actually wired.

One shared MCP layer

Every supported agent speaks MCP, the open protocol for tool calls.
Shared tools: deck, file, search, shell, Git, Ctrl Port, memory.
A commander can read the Kanban or check Git while it works or delegates.

Command & control

Voice

Command the deck by voice, or use a separate hotkey for dictation that follows your cursor into any app, even when Control Deck is only in the system tray.

Conversational

Hands-free back-and-forth with your agents over a realtime voice model.
Ask, redirect, and follow up out loud while the deck keeps working.
OpenAI Realtime or xAI Grok Voice, with your own key.

Push-to-talk

Hold a key, speak a command, release.
On-device recognition, under 500ms on CPU after setup.
GPU when available, offline after the first model download.

System-wide dictation

Separate hotkey from voice command and control.
Hold it and speak: text lands wherever your cursor is focused.
Works inside Control Deck and in other apps while open, minimized, or only in the Windows system tray.

Beyond terminals

Workspace

More than terminals live on the deck. Each of these is a card, and each is available to agents as a tool.

Browser previews & Ctrl Port

Localhost dev servers are discovered automatically.
Open, restart, or stop them through Ctrl Port.
Preview the running app next to the agent building it.

Kanban

A shared board lives on the deck as a card.
Move tasks by hand, or let a commander read and update it.

Git

Status, diffs, and history in a Git card.
Agents check repo state through the same tool.

Scratchpad, images, music

Markdown scratchpad for notes and plans.
Screenshots and clips land in a media card per deck.
Music card for long sessions in the control room.

Ctrl Ledger

Memory

Optional background memory so context survives between sessions without you managing it by hand.

Durable workspace memory

Records and summarizes what matters as you work.
Persists across sessions so agents do not start cold.

Your provider, your credits

Runs on Codex OAuth, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or OpenCode Zen/Go.
Reuses credits you already have. No separate memory bill.

A memory audit you can read

Shows what agents read, wrote, and superseded.
Stored on your machine, inspectable, not a black box.

Personalize

Make it yours

You will spend real hours here. Backgrounds and themes make the room feel like home.

Living backgrounds

Built-in scenes rendered from real video.
Or drop in your own image or clip per deck.

Full theme module

Recolor accents and chrome across the whole UI.
Tune it until the control room feels right.

PTY craft

Terminal craft

A CLI cockpit only works if the terminal underneath is boring in the best way: smooth, sharp, and reliable.

Resizes that do not smear

Resize bursts coalesce into one final size.
ConPTY repaints once instead of smearing mid-drag.

Crisp text at any zoom

Zoom raises raster density instead of stretching a bitmap.
Redraw lands in the same frame, no blank flash.

Wide glyphs stay aligned

Same Unicode width table in live view and off-screen mirror.
Emoji and CJK stay on grid during replay.

Scrollback that survives

Switch decks or restart and terminals restore from snapshot.
Bytes mid-reattach stay ordered. Nothing missed or doubled.

Replay for the live grid

Pending resizes flush before the screen is serialized.
Restored buffer matches the grid you see now.

One process, cleanly reaped

Remounts attach to the live process instead of spawning a second one.
Quit kills the Windows process tree so nothing lingers.

Yours

Local & owned

The control room runs on your machine. No Control Deck account. No hosted service in the loop.

No account required

App, decks, and files stay on your machine.
Sign in to the provider CLIs you already use.

Secrets in OS storage

Keys live in your OS credential store.
What leaves your machine is down to the providers you choose.

No extra hosted bill

Even optional memory reuses a provider you already pay for.
Founder license is one-time. No Control Deck subscription.

In the works

On the roadmap

A few things are not finished yet, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

A fuller audit trail