Shipping with the Allternit Factory build. This section describes the approved design. Until the build lands, the commands, routes and screens below are not live. Each page says so where it matters.
Allternit Factory is the harness of harnesses. It runs a team of agents (Gizzi, Claude Code, Codex, Kimi, Grok, agy, hosted bots and vendor bots) against a plan of work, checks the work, and keeps the proof. It’s not a second product. It’s what Gizzi (the terminal product) and Allternit Desktop (the graphical product) both run. You type gizzi, or you open Desktop. Underneath sits one engine, allternit-factory, which you never type. It installs next to Gizzi and inside Desktop, and every surface reads it.

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Gizzi, the engine and Desktop

  • Gizzi is both a product and a harness. With no arguments, gizzi opens the TUI. Inside a Factory pane, Gizzi is an agent harness like Claude Code or Codex. The same binary does both, so Gizzi dogfoods itself.
  • The engine is one process that outlives any window. Agents keep running when you close Gizzi. Desktop and your phone read the same engine at the same time. An engine crash doesn’t take your terminal with it, which is why the engine is a separate executable.
  • One TUI, two renderers. Gizzi’s TUI draws the home screen, the agents list, the board and approvals. The engine’s Rust pane view draws the wall of live terminals. You only ever launch gizzi.
  • Windows. Gizzi runs on Windows, but the pane engine is Unix-only. On Windows, Gizzi drives a Factory running on another machine (a Mac, Linux, or a cloud computer).

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Where the engine comes from

  • Desktop bundles allternit-factory and runs it while Desktop is open. On first run it links gizzi (and only gizzi) into ~/.local/bin, if nothing else is there. It also removes the retired work-engine and orchestrator entries from ~/.local/bin (which ones), but only after checking each one is the old tool.
  • The npm package, the Homebrew formula and the runtime packages install allternit-factory next to gizzi.
  • Code mode in Desktop shows Terminal bots as live tiles mirroring their engine panes, with the bot’s avatar, bot@team, harness and current node. On a phone (ai.allternit.com or the m.allternit.com app), the Code terminal has a strip of Terminal bots to switch between their panes.

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The four parts

The Factory is organized into four parts. Each is a top-level Gizzi command and a section of these docs. Why agents and not threads. The first part is the crew: which agents exist, which harness each runs on, which machine they’re on. A Thread in Allternit is a conversation or an assignment with an agent. If the crew part were called threads, the word would mean two things. So threads live in orchestration.

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What it replaces

The Factory merges two older tools into one engine: the earlier work engine and the agent orchestrator. Their names are removed, not aliased (old → new). Gizzi’s older agent-control commands (gizzi agent, agent-hub, runtime, mail, ac, cron, cowork) fold into the four parts, and Desktop’s separate orchestrator panel reads the engine. See Migrating from the old names.

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Built on rules

Every command follows the determinism contract: only the Gate writes, every screen is a view of the ledger, every mutation has --dry-run, every command speaks --json, nothing falls back silently, and proof comes from the judge, never from narrative.

How work moves

Intent to approval, step by step.

Command reference

Every gizzi agents|orchestration|workflows|workspace command.

Architecture

The engine layout, processes, ports and /api/factory.

Migrating from the old names

Old command and env var to new.