Ace

A collaborative coding environment where people and agents work together in channels that run on your own machines.

Your tailnet is your team and the sole authority for team membership and collaboration access. Ace has no separate accounts, invitations, or team access controls. Only allow people and machines you trust with access to your host to reach Ace over your tailnet.

Channels start with collaborator agent invocation enabled. Treat sharing a channel as granting teammates the ability to run commands on its host. bun ace share <channel> off blocks new collaborator invocations; active work continues, and teammates can still read channel history and post messages. Disabling native desktop tools does not restrict shell access.

Keep the host's gateway on loopback or your private tailnet. Do not expose it to the public internet through Tailscale Funnel, port forwarding, or a public reverse proxy. Protect local owner tokens and the team's ACE_SECRET as credentials for the access they grant. Read the trust model before running or sharing Ace.

Ace is open source software for teams to clone, fork, and operate themselves. Any shared services are deployed by the team in its own infrastructure or cloud account. Ace will not operate a hosted service.

Requires Bun 1.4 or later and a model provider key. Ace reads a key such as OPENAI_API_KEY from ACE_OPENAI_API_KEY, then OPENAI_API_KEY, then the OS keychain (bun ace key set OPENAI_API_KEY).

bun install
bun ace new --project ~/code/my-repo
bun ace ask <channel> "what does this repo do?"
bun ace --help

The app runs in a browser against the host's gateway, or as the macOS desktop app:

bun app build && bun ace serve   # start the local host
bun ace open                     # in another terminal: open its authenticated browser app
bun desktop dev                  # desktop UI and the independent Ace Helper
bun desktop build                # stable artifacts; distribution signing is still required

Open Settings in the app to check, save, replace, or remove Anthropic and OpenAI keys in Keychain. The default model is shared with the CLI's ace model command. Provider keys are never returned to the UI, and running workers read changes on their next model request. Environment overrides still take priority and are identified in Settings.

Press Cmd+O in the desktop to open a folder as a project. Opening a project needs no provider key and creates no channel. Dashboard and Channels share the project picker; start a channel from the project's dashboard or sidebar. Each project remembers its selected channel.

Settings → This Mac shows Git, shell, Tailscale, and directory status, plus Start, Stop, and Restart controls for Ace Helper. Quitting the UI leaves hosting available. Stopping the helper takes local channels offline and suspends their work; restarting it and reopening a channel resumes that work.

Development desktop builds use their own catalog, settings, and Keychain service (ace-dev). The installed stable app and CLI use ace. Build with Bun 1.4 or later; the packaged UI uses Electrobun's compatible bundled runtime, and Ace Helper carries its own compiled runtime.

Start Tailscale to collaborate: the host shares its channels over the tailnet, and the app shows teammates' channels. Local work can run without Tailscale; remote collaboration uses the tailnet.

On your phone or another of your devices, with Tailscale on, open the address the host prints (http://<machine>.<tailnet>.ts.net:4140). Only the host's owner is served; Tailscale names the person behind each connection. Teammates open their own host, which shows your channels.

When the tailnet has HTTPS certificates, hosts also listen on HTTPS (port + 1000) and the deployed web app can reach them. Deploy it with bun --filter @ace/app deploy, point each host at it with bun ace web https://ace-app.<your-subdomain>.workers.dev, then open it and enter <machine>.<tailnet>.ts.net:5140. Add it to the home screen to use it as an app.

A hosted channel lives in a Durable Object deployed by your team and runs its tools on the host that created it, while that host runs ace serve or the desktop app. To try one locally, put ACE_SECRET and a model key in services/channel/.dev.vars, then:

bun --filter @ace/channel-service dev                     # http://localhost:8787
printf %s "$SECRET" | bun ace key set ACE_SECRET          # the value in .dev.vars
bun ace new --hosted http://localhost:8787 --project ~/code/my-repo

The team's directory lists every host's channels, so they stay visible while their host sleeps. Run services/directory the same way (bun --filter @ace/directory dev --port 8788), then point each host at it with bun ace directory http://localhost:8788.

To deploy both to your Cloudflare account, give the Workers and every host the same secret:

SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32)
printf %s "$SECRET" | bun ace key set ACE_SECRET
for s in channel directory; do (cd services/$s && bunx wrangler deploy && printf %s "$SECRET" | bunx wrangler secret put ACE_SECRET); done
(cd services/channel && bunx wrangler secret put ANTHROPIC_API_KEY)   # and any other model keys
bun ace directory https://ace-directory.<your-subdomain>.workers.dev

If bun desktop dev or build exits silently, macOS killed Electrobun's downloaded CLI for an invalid signature. Re-sign it once with codesign --force -s - apps/desktop/node_modules/electrobun/bin/electrobun.

• Terms: what Ace's words mean. Binding.
• Architecture: how channels, hosts, and shared services fit together.
• Desktop plan: packaging, settings, onboarding, and distribution.
• Native desktop inspection: inspect macOS windows with Peekaboo.
• Browser tools: list, navigate, and inspect pages in a dedicated browser.