What is Ikenga?
Ikenga is an open-source, local-first desktop AI workspace for people who run their day through a coding agent. It is one window where you talk to an agent, browse and read files, and run and watch workflows — split panes, side by side, all of it aware of itself.
The point isn’t a single chat box. It’s a composable workforce that lives inside the workspace: agents, skills, slash commands, scheduled jobs, and a persistent memory layer — named, inspectable parts you can read as files. The 18 months we spent running a real company on this system is the proof it works, not a feature you have to care about.
Underneath the chrome, everything is a package (a “pkg”): mini-apps, tool servers, engine adapters — each one independently installable and updatable. The engine that drives the workspace is swappable too. Claude Code is fully wired today; Codex and Gemini are pluggable adapters.
Ikenga is built on Tauri 2 and licensed Apache-2.0. The source lives at github.com/Royalti-io.
A short glossary
Section titled “A short glossary”Ikenga borrows its vocabulary from the Igbo tradition. You don’t need to learn it to use the product — the plain-English value comes first, and the lore is a light layer underneath. But you’ll meet these terms across the docs:
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ikenga | The workspace itself — “a personal seat of strength.” |
| Obi | The home view and shell chrome — the window that holds your panes. |
| Chi | The engine adapter that drives your workspace (Claude Code / Codex / Gemini). One Chi at a time per chat thread. |
| Iyke | The runtime-controller CLI that drives a running shell from the terminal or an MCP client. |
| pkg | A package — the manifest-driven unit of everything beyond the window chrome. |
| Commission | Create a project. |
| Retire | Uninstall or archive. |
| Share kola | Grant permissions consent. |
There are two CLIs, and they do different jobs:
ikenga— the disk-side package manager (add,update,list,dev).iyke— the runtime controller that drives a shell that’s already running.
They share no code. You can install either one on its own.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Install → — download and run the shell.
- Pkgs → — the manifest-driven extension system: archetypes, capabilities, the AppBridge handshake, lifecycle.
- Engines → — the
Engineinterface and the Chi adapter model; Claude Code, noop, and pluggable Codex/Gemini. - mcp-iyke → — the MCP server that exposes a running shell as tools so any model can drive it.
The Ikenga tradition is drawn from the Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria. Full credits live on the About / Lore page.