Overview

Friday is a terminal coding agent. You describe what you want, Friday writes the code.

If you've used Claude Code or Codex, the surface looks familiar: a terminal app, slash commands, custom commands, skills, MCP servers. The shape of the work is different.

What's different

When you ask Friday to build something, the conversation you're typing into doesn't write code. That conversation is called Dispatch. Dispatch spawns a thread on its own git branch, in its own worktree, and the thread does the implementation. When the thread finishes, Friday cherry-picks the branch back onto yours through an automatic merge queue.

That gives you a few things:

• Multiple threads can run in parallel without stepping on each other.
• You can keep typing in Dispatch while a thread is busy. New messages queue up.
• Reviewing what changed is /diff against the thread's branch.
• A code-review subagent runs on the opposite provider before you ship. If the driver is Claude, the reviewer is GPT. If the driver is GPT, the reviewer is Claude.

If self-review is on (it is by default), the thread also looks over its own diff and cuts anything that drifted from the request before handing back.

GIT mode and Cowboy mode

Friday picks one of two modes at startup based on where you launched it.

In GIT mode, the default in any git repo, each thread gets its own worktree on its own branch and the merge queue cherry-picks finished threads back onto yours. Use this for almost everything.

In Cowboy mode, auto-enabled outside a git repo or with friday --cowboy, there's no isolation, no branches, no merge queue. All threads share the same directory. Use it for quick scripts, prototyping in /tmp, or working in a non-git directory.

If you launched Friday in a git repo, you're in GIT mode. The rest of these docs assume that. See GIT mode and Cowboy mode for the side-by-side.

When Friday fits

Use Friday when:

• You want to ship a feature end-to-end, not autocomplete a line.
• You're working in a git repo and want each change on its own branch.
• You want to run two or three independent changes at once.
• You want a second-opinion review baked into the flow.

Friday isn't a hosted IDE; it runs in your terminal. It isn't an autocomplete; use Copilot or Cursor for that. It isn't a generic LLM API; use the SDK directly.

Read next

• Quickstart: install, authenticate, type a first prompt.
• How Friday works: the agent loop, in plain English.
• Dispatch, threads, and subagents: the asymmetry between the one Dispatch and the many threads.
• Build a feature and open a PR: the end-to-end happy path.

If you're coming from Claude Code or Codex, start here.