Paddock

Try it on your own Claude Code history, in one command:

cd ~/code/some-project        # somewhere you've used Claude Code
npx @edspencer/paddock --here

Paddock opens that directory as a workspace and offers your existing sessions for import — nothing to install, nothing to clone. What it writes to the directory →

What is Paddock?

Paddock is a project-first launchpad for herdctl. It turns Claude Code into something you run on a server and reach from a browser: long-lived agents, one per project, whose chats persist and resume — instead of a laptop full of terminal tabs you can’t get back to from your phone.

A project is just a directory. Paddock runs Claude Code in it — a herdctl agent whose working directory is that project — and the chats you see in the UI are that agent’s sessions, persisted on disk and resumable across reloads, reconnects, and devices.

And a chat isn’t the only way work starts. Turns run on a schedule, react to events, and can be driven by an external MCP client — so a project keeps moving while you’re asleep, and you read the transcript in the morning.

Paddock isn’t just for software engineers. A project can be a codebase, but it can just as easily be a research notebook, a writing desk, or a home-ops runbook — anything you’d want a capable, always-available agent to work on. It shines when you run it on an always-on machine and give its agents the tools they need (a scoped GitHub token, ffmpeg, whatever your work calls for). See Who Paddock is for.

Project-first

Every project has its own agent, files, and changelog. Notebook projects live in your data repo; repo-backed projects clone an external git repo as the agent’s working directory — and a notebook can be promoted to one later.

Persistent, resumable chats

Server-hosted sessions survive reloads, reconnects, and devices. Fork, queue-while-streaming, stop, search, pin, and archive are built in, and a chat that gets stuck is nudged back to work.

Real tool use, streamed live

Replies stream token by token. File writes, commands, and nested sub-agents render as live cards as they run, with per-chat cost and a context meter you can read at any point in the transcript. Send it files and images, too.

Work that starts itself

One triggers model covers both halves of unattended work: cron schedules and event hooks that fire a scoped agent when something happens. Run history shows what ran while you were away.

Yours to host

One npx command to try it on your laptop. For always-on, two official images — a lean base and a devbox with the full coding-agent toolbox — plus ready-made Docker, Proxmox, Kubernetes and reverse-proxy-auth recipes. Bring your own authentication; it ships with none.

Open at both ends

A thin project layer over the herdctl FleetManager, so anything the fleet engine does Paddock can wire in. On the other side, a credential-gated management API at /mcp lets an outside MCP client drive it — read-only until you say otherwise.

Start here

Getting started One npx command to try it, or Docker for an always-on instance.

What's new What landed recently, release by release.

Working in chats Streaming, queueing, forking, stopping — the day-to-day.

Deploying Paddock The recommended always-on, low-power setup.

Securing Paddock Put authentication in front — read before exposing it.

What your agents can do The other half of security: a turn's tools, reach and blast radius.

Concepts Workspaces, projects, agents, chats-as-sessions, triggers, the sweeper.

Configuration Every PADDOCK_* environment variable, with defaults.

Architecture Storage model, WebSocket flow, MCP injection, auth.