About Workbench
Origins
Section titled “Origins”Workbench is a fork of Claudette, an open-source desktop companion for Claude Code built by Utensils. Claudette is a great product — it was the first to prove that a native desktop app could make working with Claude Code dramatically better than raw terminal sessions.
We started using Claudette at r26D and quickly realized it could be the foundation for something we needed: a tool built around our workflows and real-time collaboration.
Why we forked
Section titled “Why we forked”Claudette does a lot of things well, but we had specific goals that pulled in a different direction:
- Workflow-first design. We wanted opinionated support for iteration tracking, work decomposition, and the kind of structured development practices our team relies on — not just a wrapper around agent sessions.
- Collaboration as a core feature. We want to remote pair with teammates through the tool itself — seeing what each other’s agents are doing, sharing context, and reviewing work together in real time. That’s a different architectural bet than a single-user desktop app.
- Tight integration with our stack. We needed deep hooks into our SCM workflows, environment providers, and deployment patterns without waiting for upstream to prioritize them.
Relationship to Claudette
Section titled “Relationship to Claudette”We have enormous respect for what Utensils built. Claudette’s architecture — Tauri 2 + Rust + React, agent subprocess management, git worktree orchestration — is solid engineering, and we’re grateful it’s MIT-licensed.
Workbench isn’t a competing product. It’s a divergent fork that serves a different audience: teams that want a collaborative, workflow-driven orchestrator rather than a polished single-user companion.
Who builds Workbench
Section titled “Who builds Workbench”Workbench is built by r26D. We are not affiliated with Anthropic. Claude and Claude Code are trademarks of Anthropic, PBC.