A CLI for AI-assisted development. Portable skills across LLMs. Reproducible terminal workspaces.

Vibe coding is here. LLMs are racing to top benchmarks with infinite funding behind them. You want to switch when one pulls ahead—but your skills are stuck in .claude/ or .codex/.

Not using skills? You're leaving most of the LLM potential on the table. Copy-pasting them between tools? They drift out of sync.

Meanwhile, your terminal is chaos and your IDE crashes and keep losing context.

axel fixes both and goes beyond.

Write your skills once. axel symlinks them wherever they need to go.

skills/
  code-reviewer.md
  frontend-engineer.md
  security-auditor.md

Switch LLMs by changing one line. No more copy-pasting between .claude/commands/ and .codex/agents/.

One command. Your entire workspace materializes.

# AXEL.md (frontmatter)
workspace: myproject

layouts:
  panes:
    - type: claude
      skills: ["*"]
    - type: custom
      name: backend
      command: npm run dev
      path: ./backend
    - type: custom
      name: frontend
      command: pnpm dev
      path: ./frontend

  grids:
    default:
      type: tmux
      claude:
        col: 0
        row: 0
      backend:
        col: 1
        row: 0
      frontend:
        col: 1
        row: 1

axel

Claude on the left, servers on the right. Close everything, come back tomorrow, run axel again—exactly where you left off.

curl -sL https://install.axel.md | bash

Or build from source:

cargo install --path crates/cli

• tmux for workspace management
• One or more AI coding assistants

Skills can be dispatched to any of the following LLMs:

• Claude Code - Anthropic
• Codex - OpenAI
• OpenCode - Open source
• Antigravity - Google

See the full Quick Start guide for detailed instructions.

# Initialize a workspace in current directory
axel init

# Import your existing skills
axel skill import ./.claude/commands/web-developer.md
axel skill import ./skills/

# Launch a single AI pane (skills are symlinked automatically)
axel claude

# Or launch the full workspace
axel

Note: axel bootstrap exists to auto-discover skills across your machine, but it's experimental. We recommend manually importing skills with axel skill import <file|dir> for more control.

# Daily workflow
axel                          # Launch workspace from AXEL.md
axel -w feat/auth             # Launch in a git worktree
axel -k                       # Kill session and clean up

# Sessions
axel session list             # List running sessions
axel session join <name>      # Attach to a session
axel session kill <name>      # Kill a session

# Layouts
axel layout ls                # List panes and grids (JSON output)
axel layout ls --json         # Explicit JSON format

# Skills
axel skill list               # List all skills
axel skill import <path>      # Import from file or directory
axel skill new                # Create a new skill
axel skill fork <name>        # Copy global skill locally
axel skill link <name>        # Symlink global skill locally

See the CLI Reference for all options.

Define panes and grid layouts in the layouts section:

layouts:
  # Pane definitions - what runs in each pane
  panes:
    # AI assistants (built-in types: claude, codex, opencode, antigravity)
    - type: claude
      skills: ["code-reviewer", "frontend-engineer"]
      model: sonnet

    - type: codex
      skills: ["*"]  # All skills

    # Custom panes - use type: custom with unique names
    - type: custom
      name: shell
      notes:
        - "Free shell for commands"

    - type: custom
      name: backend
      path: ./backend
      command: npm run dev

    - type: custom
      name: frontend
      path: ./frontend
      command: pnpm dev

  # Grid layouts - how panes are arranged
  # Reference panes by their name (claude, codex, shell, backend, frontend)
  grids:
    default:
      type: tmux  # tmux, tmux_cc (iTerm2), or shell
      claude:
        col: 0
        row: 0
      backend:
        col: 1
        row: 0
        height: 50
      frontend:
        col: 1
        row: 1

Centralize your skills:

skills:
  - path: ./skills           # Local skills
  - path: ~/.config/axel/skills  # Global skills

• Run multiple AI coding assistants and are tired of maintaining separate skill configs
• Work across several repositories that need to be running simultaneously
• Want reproducible dev environments they can spin up instantly
• Believe their tooling should adapt to them, not the other way around

• Website
• Documentation

MIT