Atelier · open source
An app harness for coding agents.
Point a coding agent at a folder and it becomes a live app. Atelier owns the hard parts — build, routing, real‑time, auth, the visual language — so every app stays small enough to fit in one context window.
$ curl -fsSL https://theatelier.dev/setup.sh | bash
The harness
Atelier fixes the things that are hard to get right across an app, so each app stays small, self‑contained, and safe. The constraints are the point: freeze the baseline and the visuals, and many small apps add up to one large, coherent, multi‑tenant system.
the fixed baseline
Owns the cross‑cutting machinery — the build step, routing, the real‑time WebSocket, hot reload, workspaces, auth, and the module boundary. These are frozen: you build on them, never rebuild them — and because they don't move, you can trust them.
visual coherence
One theme wraps every app, so dozens of independently‑built apps look like one product — and no single app can reach in and restyle the whole system. Visuals are the chrome's job, not each app's.
just your feature
A frontend.jsx and/or a backend.js — that's it. No build to
configure, no dependencies to vendor, no design system to invent. Thin by design, and
small enough to hold in one context window.
Modules
Point your agent at a folder. A frontend.jsx becomes a React component with hooks,
deep routing, and a live real‑time channel — sharing the shell's single React. A
backend.js mounts scoped routes, broadcasts over the socket, and hot‑swaps with
no restart. No bundler to configure. No second React. Just the feature.
export default function Module() { return <div className="p-8">hello</div>; }
That's a complete, routed, hot‑reloading app. The shell handles the rest.
Sharing modules
Coming soonBecause a module is a self‑contained folder that depends only on the frozen shell contract, it travels. Soon: publish a module, install someone else's into your atelier, and let a marketplace of context‑window‑sized apps compose into your own coherent system — each one safe to drop in, none able to break the whole.