Orca calls itself an Agent Development Environment, and the framing is more than marketing — it is a real architectural distinction. Where a traditional IDE is a single workspace that one developer drives, Orca treats each coding agent as a first-class collaborator that needs its own isolated environment. Every task you assign spins up a dedicated git worktree with its own terminal, browser, and source-control view, so a Claude Code session refactoring authentication never collides with a Codex session building a new API endpoint. The result is parallel agent work without the context bleed that plagues terminal-juggling or tab-switching setups.
The tool supports 25+ CLI coding agents — including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Gemini, OpenCode, Amp, Goose, Grok, and Aider — and you bring your own subscriptions. There is no per-seat fee and no model markup; Orca is the orchestration layer, not another paid agent. A hot-swap accounts feature lets teams rotate between API keys or user accounts mid-session to manage rate limits, and the WebGL-rendered terminal with infinite splits gives you a serious operations console for monitoring fan-out runs. Built-in git tracking surfaces diffs per worktree, so reviewing what each agent did is a question of scrolling rather than checking out branches.
Orca is MIT-licensed, self-hosted, and ships as a native desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, with an iOS and Android companion app that lets you monitor and approve agent work from your phone. The repository is moving fast — close to 3,000 GitHub stars and active daily commits — and the changelog reflects weekly improvements to terminal performance, agent integrations, and the diff review workflow. For anyone running multiple coding agents in parallel, Orca is the most opinionated and most complete answer to the orchestration problem on the market today.
