wicked-studio

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The cockpit for AI coding agents you can actually trust. wicked-studio is a browser UI for running coding-agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, and more) as governed workers: you give an intent, the agents do the work behind verification gates, and you approve the decisions that matter — with the evidence behind every "done" one click away.

It's the human surface of the wicked platform. The agents run headless in the background; studio is where you point them at your repos, watch them work in real time, unblock them when they need a human, and see what actually happened.

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Why you'd want it

Coding agents are fast but unsupervised — they assert "done," grade their own work, and bury the reasoning in a scrollback you'll never read. wicked-studio flips that:

• Direct, don't babysit. Launch runs across many repos and projects at once, then let them work. Attention comes to you when a run hits a gate — you don't sit watching one terminal.

• Approve what matters. Human-in-the-loop gates surface the real decisions (approve, approve with a steer, or reject) — with keyboard batch triage when several pile up.

• "Done" is proven, not claimed — and the gate says how. By default a run requires a distinct evaluator and a judge: review goes to a seat other than the creator's. When no such seat exists, the run stops at a gate that says why. You can then sign a second seat in, or relaunch with reduced assurance, an explicit opt-in that the launch form and composer also offer on a one-seat roster. A reduced run is labelled "Reduced assurance" on the session, every gate and the delivery. A team run never grades on its creator's seat. A required judge that could not run holds its gate as "Waiting for a judge seat"; it is not a rejection. A gate row or delivery whose evaluation the engine recorded one for (wicked-core-ts 0.7.46 and later) shows the run's assurance receipt:

  • what the run required and what actually ran;
  • who built, evaluated and judged the work, and whether those were separate seats;
  • what was skipped and why;
  • the tree and the attempt.

  So "Floor-only approval" reads differently from "Independently accepted". A post-hoc hand-over that nothing re-verified is labelled "Unverified delivery", along with whether its tree moved, and the delivery shows the QE acceptance check when the run requires one.

  A run that changes the application (feature, bug, migration, mcp-server) requires QE acceptance before it delivers. The session header, every gate and the delivery say where that stands: "QE acceptance: required", "waived (score N)" when the run's change scored in the lowest band on every dimension, or "skipped by operator (reason)". The launch form offers Skip QE acceptance, which needs a reason before it can be sent, and Force QE acceptance, which keeps it required even when the score would waive it (wicked-core-ts 0.7.49 and later). Every run leaves transcripts, diffs, and a downloadable evidence bundle. Studio shows you the gate outcomes; it never grades the work itself.

• Understand the code first. Onboard a repo and studio builds its graph — then blast-radius for any symbol, hotspots, the domain/requirements view, and a searchable map of what calls what.

What you can do

• Run governed agents on your repos — register a local path or clone a URL; studio builds the code graph, then you launch runs (ask / balanced / autonomous), pick which agent seats join, and bind a repo with optional PR delivery.
• Steer runs live — the Desk (the one shell) puts what needs you first; every run or chat opens as a session (/s/:id): one thread with the live record, gate rows you answer in place (approve / steer / reject), elicitation prompts, pre-gate guidance notes, and lifecycle controls (cancel, inject a message, retry). The pre-session addresses (/runs/:id, /work, /p/:id/…, /chat/…) were retired and show the not-found page.
• See the evidence — per-step transcripts, a worktree file + diff viewer, and one-click evidence-bundle download for any run.
• Explore your codebase — graph view with focus navigation, blast radius, hotspots, and the domain graph with coverage.
• Plan the product — the Product view (rail → Product, /product?project=<id>) answers "what are we building" where the Desk answers "what is executing". It lists a project's requirements across every one of its repositories, grouped by repo and searchable; a repo that could not be read is named with the reason. Choose up to 40 requirements and an optional steer, and Draft epics launches a governed draft → review → approve run that opens in its session; its plan and gate are answered there. Coverage and the domain model stay on the project page. Publishing the drafted epics is not offered yet.
• Ask several seats at once — a chat can hold more than one warm CLI seat; each answers in the thread, and the daemon checks every path, path:line and commit a reply cites against the repo.
• Govern the work — author steering rules and policies, browse the decisions ledger, and review what the platform has learned about your repos.
• Work in projects — group repos, runs, chats, and docs; "See everything" (/everything) lists them, filterable by project, and a project's address (/p/:id) opens its scoped Sessions list; deep-linkable routes throughout.
• Plus governed terminals, a Cmd+K command palette, document & video creation modes, and desktop notifications when a run needs you.

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Get started

Studio ships inside wicked-crew — one command gives you the API, the engine, and this UI on a single port:

npx wicked-crew serve
# then open the URL it prints (default http://127.0.0.1:7701)

That's the whole install for most people — no separate studio setup. Prefer a guided setup, or want the rest of the wicked family too? Use the installer:

npx wicked-installer

It installs and wires wicked-crew (which serves this UI) alongside the other wicked-* tools, across whichever coding-agent CLIs you already use.

Keeping it up to date

Studio rides along with crew, so you update it by updating crew:

npm i -g wicked-crew@latest    # or: npx wicked-installer  (updates the whole family)

Each wicked-crew release bundles the matching studio build, so a fresh crew is a fresh UI. To see what changed, check the releases.

Requirements

• Node.js ≥ 22, npm ≥ 10
• A running wicked-crew daemon, v0.7.0+ (bundled and started for you by npx wicked-crew serve — you only need this floor if you point a standalone studio at your own daemon)
• A modern browser — Chrome, Edge, or Firefox on macOS, Linux, or Windows (or Safari on macOS)

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For developers

Studio is a Vite/React SPA and a pure HTTP/WS client of the wicked-crew daemon — it talks only to crew's published /api/v1 REST surface and /ws event stream, and imports zero crew source. The one thing the two share is the wire-contract package wicked-crew-api-types.

┌─────────────────┐     HTTP /api/v1 + WS /ws    ┌────────────────────┐
│  wicked-studio  │ ───────────────────────────▶ │ wicked-crew daemon │
│   (React SPA)   │ ◀─────────────────────────── │  API · engine ·    │
│                 │   contract: wicked-crew-api-types │  gates · evidence │
└─────────────────┘                              └────────────────────┘

Develop

npx wicked-crew serve          # a control plane on :7701 for the SPA to talk to
npm install
npm run dev                    # vite on http://127.0.0.1:4200, pointed at :7701

npm test (vitest + testing-library), npm run typecheck, npm run lint, npm run build (tsc + vite → dist/). CI runs all four on ubuntu / macos / windows for every PR.

Standalone build

You can build studio and host it yourself, pointed at any reachable daemon:

VITE_API_HOST=127.0.0.1:7701 npm run build
npx serve dist                 # any static server with SPA fallback works

The SPA finds its daemon two ways: bundled/same-origin (production) calls back to window.location.origin, so --port / CREW_PORT just work with no host baked in; standalone uses VITE_API_HOST (host:port, no scheme) fixed at build time. The daemon's loopback CORS admits any localhost / 127.0.0.1 origin, so a standalone studio drives a local daemon out of the box. e2e/studio_standalone_test.py is the scripted proof of this mode.

Editor plugins

Artifact editors are plugins: one self-contained HTML file per editor, run in a sandboxed frame with no network and talking to studio's plugin host over one MessagePort (wicked.editor/1, src/editors/). Settings → Developer → Editor plugins lists the editors the daemon serves (built in, or installed by a run). It links each one to the editor test page (/editors/dev), which opens it in the real host over a sample page. Create an editor plugin puts /workflow-editor-plugin in the Desk composer. That workflow scaffolds the editor with the wicked-garden-editor-scaffold skill, runs its conformance cases, and installs it after a consent gate. It also opens a pull request. /editors/conformance is the conformance host that e2e/editor_conformance_test.py drives in CI; it has no nav or ⌘K entry.

How crew ships this UI

The npm package publishes dist/ only. wicked-crew declares wicked-studio as a devDependency and its build:with-studio step copies node_modules/wicked-studio/dist into the daemon's serving tree, so npx wicked-crew serve is same-origin UI + API on one port (with a headless fallback when the dist is absent). A studio release therefore also bumps crew's devDep pin.

The repo also carries a data-testid selector contract (testid-inventory.json, regenerated with npm run manifest:testids and drift-checked in CI) that the test generators build against — see CLAUDE.md for the full contributor doctrine.

Contributing

1. Fork and branch.
2. npm install && npm run dev — SPA on :4200, daemon on :7701.
3. npm test && npm run typecheck && npm run lint before committing.
4. Open a PR; CI runs all four gates on ubuntu / macos / windows.

Keep the wire-contract boundary intact: all crew interaction goes through /api/v1 and /ws, never a crew-source import — if a type is missing, it lands in wicked-crew-api-types first.

Provenance

Studio was extracted from the wicked-crew monorepo (packages/studio) as its own product, preserving the full in-monorepo history via git subtree split. An earlier, pre-consolidation incarnation is archived read-only at wicked-studio-archived.

License

MIT