Docs / Core concepts
How Amoeba thinks about work.
Five ideas explain the whole product: workspaces, sessions and lanes, Mission Control, ownership, and the shared Brain.
A workspace is one codebase and the people working it.
What it is
- Your team’s org contains workspaces; each workspace wraps one repository and its members.
- Roles are granted per workspace, so a person can run the org and still be a viewer in a given workspace.
- Private by default. Nothing in Amoeba is ever public.
One session, one task, one branch, one plan.
The room
- A session is where a task gets done. It has exactly one branch and one plan, shared by everyone in it.
- Each participant works in their own lane: their own conversation with their own agent, shown side by side in columns. Everyone sees every lane, live.
- Watching is a first-class mode: read-only, with your presence visible. There is no invisible lurking.
GitHub shows the past. Mission Control shows the present.
The board
- The default screen. Every live session is a card: the task, its status, who is in it, whose account the current turn uses, progress through the plan, and the files being touched.
- The alerts strip only ever shows actionable items: an approval waiting, a takeover offer, a collision. Each is one click to resolve.
- Finished sessions move to History: read-only rooms with the full transcript, the final diff and the plan.
Work belongs to people. Agents just execute it.
Who holds what
- Work is assigned to people, never to agents. A person holds work; their agent executes it. That is why a teammate without an agent can still hold, hand back and finish work.
- Every agent turn has exactly one visible sponsor. Before anything runs, the composer says whose account it uses. Nothing ever quietly spends a teammate’s subscription.
What one agent learns, every agent knows.
Memory
- The Brain keeps short, structured notes pinned to specific files and commits: decisions, gotchas, conventions. Every agent in the workspace reads them, and agents write new ones as they work.
- When a merge moves the code a note points at, the note is flagged and the next agent working nearby rewrites it. Git keeps the Brain honest, so there is no stale context file problem.
- Humans can read, edit or retire any memory at any time.