Cave
The desktop home for your Coven — a native workspace for talking to familiars, watching their tools, and inspecting their memory.
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Cave is OpenCoven's native desktop application. It is the place where your familiars live and where you go to be with them — to talk, watch what they're doing, and follow their work across sessions.
A familiar is not a chat window. It has a name, a purpose, a memory, a toolset, and a place in your day. Cave is the surface that makes that visible.
Cave is local-first. It talks to the coven daemon on your machine over a Unix socket at ~/.coven/coven.sock. There is no cloud, no upstream, no remote authority.
What Cave Is
| Surface | Role | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Familiar rail | Presence | See your familiars at a glance. Switch between them. Know who is active. |
| Conversation pane | Talk | Talk to a familiar like you would in any chat surface — but with continuity, memory, and tools attached. |
| Inspector | Observe | Watch tool calls, memory reads/writes, and session events as they happen. |
| Terminal | Witness | See harness sessions stream in real time via xterm.js. |
| Daemon link | Boundary | All sensitive operations route through the Coven daemon on the local socket. |
Cave and CastCodes
Cave is not a replacement for CastCodes. They are siblings, with different jobs:
| Client | Shape | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Cave | Desktop app (Tauri 2) | Talking to familiars, watching tools, inspecting memory, ambient presence. |
| CastCodes | Terminal + code workspace | Running Cast Codes, code review, editing, and the demo loop. |
| `coven` CLI/TUI | Command line | Daemon control, scripting, and headless workflows. |
Both clients submit structured requests to the same Coven daemon. The daemon remains the authority boundary — see Cast Codes → Authority Rule.
Stack
| Layer | Tech |
|---|---|
| Native shell | Tauri 2 (macOS / Windows / Linux) |
| Frontend | Next.js 16 (App Router, Turbopack) |
| Styles | Tailwind v4 |
| Terminal | xterm.js |
| IPC | Unix socket → ~/.coven/coven.sock |
Install (Development)
Cave is in early development. To run from source:
git clone https://github.com/OpenCoven/coven-cave.git
cd coven-cave
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev # native window
# or
pnpm dev # browser-only at http://localhost:3000You will need the coven daemon running locally — see Install Coven.
Keybinds
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
⌘B | Toggle familiar rail |
⇧⌘B | Toggle inspector pane |
| drag handles | Resize side panels |
App Identity
- Brand: Cave
- macOS app name: CovenCave
- Bundle:
ai.opencoven.cave - Repo:
OpenCoven/coven-cave - License: AGPL + MIT dual license
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