Your First Hour With Munder Difflin

Most tools ask you to learn them before they do anything. Munder Difflin is the other kind: within an hour you’ve briefed an orchestrator, watched agents work, approved a real change, and left the office running without you. Here’s that hour, minute by minute.

Minute 0 — Install #

Two paths: grab a signed build (macOS, Windows, Linux) from the releases page, or clone and run from source with npm install && npm run dev. You need Node.js 18+, a C/C++ toolchain for node-pty, and at least one supported agent CLI on your PATH — Claude Code, Antigravity, Codex, OpenCode, Crush, pi.dev, or GitHub Copilot CLI.

I won’t repeat the details here; the install and usage guide covers prerequisites, troubleshooting, and the node-pty rebuild gotcha. Budget five minutes.

Minute 5 — The onboarding wizard #

First launch drops you into a short wizard, and the four choices it asks for are the actual shape of the product:

• Harness home — the folder where the hive lives: per-agent memory, mailboxes, the blackboard, the event log. Plain files in a local git repo, relocatable later.
• Registered repos — the codebases your agents will work on. This is what feeds GitHub issue ingestion and the CI watcher later.
• Default command / auto-mode — which agent CLI new hires run by default, and whether the floor runs in auto-mode (agents proceed without per-tool prompts; the approval gate still catches critical items).
• Orchestrator engine — Michael himself runs on a pluggable engine. Claude Code is the natural default, but the wizard lets you pick, and you can change it later.

Finish the wizard and you land on the floor: a pixel-art office, empty except for Michael, who seats himself in his office automatically.

Minute 10 — Your first brief to Michael #

You don’t manage the workers. You talk to one agent — the GOD orchestrator — and he runs the floor. Click into Michael’s terminal and type a brief the way you’d brief a colleague: what you want, which repo, what “done” looks like.

Michael adjudicates. He creates tasks on the kanban, assigns them, and routes messages between agent inboxes. Workers you hire via Add agent each get a real CLI process in its own pseudo-terminal and, with the git-isolation toggle, their own worktree — so nobody collides on branches. How he decides what to route, resolve, or escalate is its own post: how the GOD orchestrator works.

A good first brief is small and self-contained: “read this repo and write a REPORT.md summarizing the architecture” beats “refactor everything” for hour one.

Minute 20 — Watch the floor, then open a desk #

Now the part that makes the product legible: the floor is not a decoration, it’s the state of the system. Avatars walk to stations as they work. When the hive routes a message, an envelope flies from sender to recipient; escalations fly to the door. The cast is an affectionate parody of The Office, and every movement maps to a real event.

Click any agent and you get their desk: the live terminal (you can type back into it), a sandboxed file browser, and a git tab with status, log, and commit graph. This is the moment the abstraction clicks — that avatar is a real claude process, and you’re reading its actual stdout.

Minute 40 — Your first approval, and the diff #

Sometime in the first hour, something lands in the approvals queue — a spend threshold, a destructive operation, a scope change. This is by design: Michael resolves routine requests himself and escalates only critical items, so the queue stays short and every item in it deserves your attention. (The philosophy behind that gate: approving AI agents without babysitting them.)

Before you click approve, look at the work. Hit the title-bar IDE button and the built-in Monaco editor — the VS Code editor engine, fully self-hosted — opens over the floor. The git CHANGES rail lists what changed; click a file for a read-only side-by-side diff against HEAD. Read the diff, approve the item, watch the envelope fly.

Minute 60 — Leave it running #

The last move of the hour is the one that changes your relationship with the tool: schedule something. The Command Center’s Schedules tab takes a label, an interval, a target agent, and a mission body — “every morning, triage new GitHub issues,” say — and a heartbeat re-engages the floor if it goes quiet. Last-fired and next-fired times are right there in the tab.

Close the laptop. It’s local-first, so tomorrow the office is exactly where you left it — probably with mail in your queue. For patterns on what’s worth automating, see scheduling autonomous agent missions.

The hour, in one line #

Install, answer four wizard questions, brief one agent, watch the floor, read one diff, set one schedule — and you’ve gone from “a CLI in a terminal” to “an office that works while you don’t.”

Download Munder Difflin — free, MIT-licensed, local-first — and if the first hour earns it, a GitHub star helps more people find it.

FAQ

How long does it take to get Munder Difflin running?

About five minutes if you already have Node.js 18+ and one supported agent CLI installed. You clone the repo, run npm install and npm run dev, and the onboarding wizard walks you through the rest: harness home, registered repos, default command, and auto-mode. Signed macOS, Windows, and Linux builds are also available on the releases page.

What do I need before installing Munder Difflin?

Node.js 18+ with npm, a C/C++ toolchain for node-pty's native addon (Xcode Command Line Tools on macOS), and at least one supported terminal-agent CLI on your PATH — Claude Code, Antigravity, OpenAI Codex, OpenCode, Crush, pi.dev, or GitHub Copilot CLI. If a chosen engine's binary is missing, the harness runs its installer in the terminal and restarts into it automatically.

Who is Michael and how do I give him work?

Michael is the GOD orchestrator — the one agent you talk to. You type a brief into his terminal (or use the Talk voice channel with your own OpenAI Realtime key) and he adjudicates it: creating tasks, assigning them to workers, routing messages between inboxes, and escalating only critical items back to you. He seats himself in Michael's office automatically on first launch.

Do I have to approve everything the agents do?

No. The GOD orchestrator resolves routine requests itself so the system stays autonomous. Only critical items — spend, destructive operations, scope changes — land in the human-in-the-loop approvals queue for you to act on. A circuit breaker and per-agent token budgets guard the rest.

How do I review what an agent actually changed?

Open the built-in Monaco IDE from the title-bar IDE button. Its git CHANGES rail lists every modified file, and clicking one opens a read-only side-by-side diff against HEAD — the VS Code editor engine, fully self-hosted, with all filesystem and git access brokered through the main process. There's also a per-agent git tab with status, log, and commit graph.

Can Munder Difflin keep working after I walk away?

Yes — that's the point. The Schedules tab in the Command Center holds recurring missions with a label, interval, target agent, and body, plus a heartbeat that re-engages the floor when it goes quiet. It's local-first, so the office runs 24/7 on hardware you already own.

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