You give the Queen a task. She reads what the colony knows, staffs the job with specialist AI ants, runs their work in parallel, and merges it into one answer, live on your Mac, where you can steer it at any point.
Five steps from task to answer.
Every run follows the same path, whether it's a quick question or a week of work split across two nests.
Read memory
The Queen reads her standing orders, the Granary knowledge that matters for this task and the colony's recent runs, and shows you the receipt of what she read.
Staff it
She looks at your colony, reuses ants that fit, and proposes new hires or a whole new nest when the work needs one. Each job gets a checklist.
Review, if you want
Approve or decline hires, reassign jobs and edit instructions before anything runs. Or let her go straight on.
Run
Jobs start as soon as what they depend on is done, so independent work happens in parallel. Nest heads review their team's work.
Answer, learn, archive
The Queen merges everything into one answer, each ant keeps a lesson, and the run goes to the Archive, where follow-up tasks build on it.
Three ways to see your colony.
Home is the colony's live view. During a run the working ants light up; click one to open its live work and its browser in the side panel. Switch between Network, Orbit and Pipeline from the top right.
Who reports to whom: the Queen, her nests and their ants.
An organisation, not a chatbot.
AntColony gives your agents the structure a real team has.
The Queen
Plans every task, staffs it, and merges the answer. She lives in the sticky button in the corner: it pulses while the colony works and shows a dot when she needs you.
Nests
Departments of ants, like Research or Engineering, each with a head who reviews the team's work and a mandate saying what it handles and what it escalates.
Ants
Specialist workers with a role, instructions and the tools their place in the authority tree allows. They learn a lesson from every run.
The authority tree
Which ant may use which tool. Rights only narrow going down: a nest never has more than its parent.
Talk to the Queen
Ask her to set up a team, hire an ant, dig a nest or change a spending limit. Each change is a card; safe, reversible ones happen at once, the rest wait for your click.
Supercolony
Where colonies will share playbooks and teams. It's on the roadmap and has its own page in the app.
Four storerooms, read before every run.
are standing rules. The is knowledge any ant can read. The keeps finished runs. The keeps failures as an audit trail and never shows them to the model.
Four storerooms the colony reads before it works, and writes to when it's done. Open a drawer.
A whole team, in one step.
Pull a team off the shelf and the Queen sets it up as one card: the nest, its lead, the specialists, the tools and the standing rules for what it handles, drafts and escalates. Or name any kind of work and the colony researches its own playbook, every claim tied to its sources.
Engineering
Reads, fixes and builds the code of your projects, using Claude Code and sandboxed terminals.
- draftWhen a change is ready: it waits for your Merge
- escalateWhen a spec has open questions
- handleWhen your checks fail: back to the builder
Questions
What is AntColony?
AntColony is a Mac app that runs a team of AI agents, called ants, for you. You give the Queen a task. She reads the colony's memory, staffs the job with ants that fit, runs them in parallel, and merges their work into one answer while you watch it live.
What are playbooks?
A playbook is a ready-made team for a kind of work. AntColony ships eleven, from Engineering and Sales to Finance and Legal, each with a lead, specialist ants, tools and standing rules for what to handle, draft or escalate, set up in one step. You can also have the colony research a new playbook from the web: every claim is tied to its sources, unsourced claims are dropped, and legal ones wait for your review.
Do I need an API key?
No key is needed to try it: demo mode runs a simulated colony, and the first ant does a short real browse so you can watch. Real runs use your own Anthropic key, which the app keeps encrypted with the macOS Keychain.
Try it with the demo colony.
Download the app and watch a simulated colony work, no key needed. Add your own key when you want it working for you.
Download for Mac