Sloppie

Sloppie is a development environment that provides a dashboard to orchestrate work over multiple parallel tasks, each of which features a coding agent running in a terminal, a git diff viewer and a code-review-like mechanism to pass comments on the diff async to the coding agent. Sloppie runs on Linux, fitting best in the GNOME desktop.

How Sloppie Differs

• Review comments. You write comments on hunks of the diff, as you would in a code review, and send them to the agent when you're ready. Comments are saved per branch under .git/sloppie and live until an agent has handled them. Most tools in this space just show you the diff to accept or reject.

• Copies instead of worktrees. A subtask is a plain cp -a of the repository + a branch forked from the latest main or master. Worktrees are the conventional choice, but the disk space they save is in most cases insignificant and a copy is faster to make, requires no setup of untracked files and is easier to delete. In modern agentic coding, branches are short-lived and independent and don't benefit from the .git sharing.

• Terminals instead of agent panes. Each task has three real terminals running your shell in the task's directory. The coding agent is only a command you run in one of them, and everything else you'd do at a shell still works as well.

• Full pages instead of split views. The dashboard and each task are pages shown one at a time. While you work on a task, nothing on screen concerns the other tasks: no list of them along the side, no counters ticking in a corner. A task that needs your input shows a desktop notification and a dot on the dashboard button.

• Native GTK. Linux + GNOME is the only target for Sloppie. Desktop notifications, keybindings etc. should work as you expect them to. Most tools in this space are either macOS-only, or Electron if they provide a Linux version.

• Small enough to make your own. No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud, no subscription and no licence that can change under you. Sloppie is around 5000 lines of open-source Python, which is little enough that a coding agent can take in the whole of it and rework it to suit you: from fonts and colors to how the thing behaves.

Installing

Sloppie is hard-coded to its author's preferences and not generic or configurable. If you like the concept and want to use Sloppie, instead of installing and using it directly, you'd likely want to clone the repository, ask a coding agent to customize the font, colors, editor etc. to your preferences and use that clone instead.

Sloppie requires Git, Python ≥3.10, PyGObject ≥3.42, GTK 4.x, GtkSourceView 5.x and VTE ≥0.76. On Debian/Ubuntu you can install the dependencies with the following command.

sudo apt install gir1.2-gtk-4.0 \
                 gir1.2-gtksource-5 \
                 gir1.2-vte-3.91 \
                 git \
                 make \
                 python3 \
                 python3-gi

Then, to install Sloppie, run command

sudo make PREFIX=/usr/local install

Notifications

Sloppie sends a desktop notification when a coding agent is done with its turn and requires your input. This is accomplished via the terminal bell: the agent rings the bell, Sloppie hears that and shows the notification. An example notification hook script below for Claude Code, file ~/.claude/notify.sh, configure in ~/.claude/settings.json.

#!/bin/bash
if [ -n "$SLOPPIE" ]; then
    # Ring the bell for Sloppie.
    printf '\a' > "${SLOPPIE_TTY:-/dev/tty}" 2>/dev/null
    exit 0
else
    notify-send -i claude -e "Claude Code" "Wants something"
fi

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks-guide#get-notified-when-claude-needs-input