RUC-NLPIR/CoworkOS

What it is

CoworkOS is an open-source cowork harness for long-horizon, human-in-the-loop projects. It targets work that spans sessions or days and needs planning, tool use, verification and recovery, such as code, research, documents, presentations, CAD, Blender scenes and scientific workflows. People and agents edit the same evolving artifacts, while model settings, workspaces, memory and execution records stay on the local machine.

The runtime has three layers: a Main Agent plans and evaluates, a Coordinator Runtime dispatches subtasks and tracks their state, and optional subagents execute scoped assignments. Long-running jobs keep status and logs so work can resume after a wait or interruption. Revisions are handled as candidate changes that can be reviewed before integration.

The project also reports using this loop for research-style iteration: five rounds raised Qwen3.6-35B-A3B's average score from 33.19 to 42.95 across eight benchmarks in the accompanying study. Code is MIT-licensed.

Getting started

The CLI path needs macOS or Linux and Node.js 22.19.0 or newer (Node.js downloads). Install the package globally, then initialize a project and check the model connection from that directory:

npm install -g coworkos-app
cd /path/to/your/project
coworkos init
coworkos doctor --test-connection
coworkos

coworkos init asks for the model service URL, model ID and API key. The connection check sends a real model request and consumes quota. Describe the work in the CLI; after exiting, coworkos --continue in the same directory resumes the latest session (CLI quickstart). The package is also listed on npm.

For the macOS desktop app (Apple Silicon, macOS 14+), the README gives:

npx coworkos-app@latest desktop install

Use constraints

• The desktop installer is limited to Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14 or later; the CLI path covers macOS and Linux.
• Node.js 22.19.0 or newer is required for both installation routes.
• A model service reachable by URL, with a model ID and API key, is needed before the CLI is usable; the connection test consumes quota.
• The documented install commands are the supported shortcuts, but no statement is given about Windows support.
• The MIT license applies with third-party exceptions noted by the project (LICENSE).

HotRepo's take

On 2026-11-04, CoworkOS entered HotRepo's new-project JavaScript list at 104 stars and 11 forks, adding 3 stars in a roughly one-hour growth window; no all-language daily rank was recorded. That is a short measurement window, so it only supports the fact of early attention, not a trend. The more useful signal is the scope of the repository: a documented CLI and desktop installer, a three-layer runtime for delegated work, and a paper with reported benchmark gains. Readers evaluating it should look at the model configuration and quickstart docs, since the harness is inert until a model service is connected.