# The AI Agent Orchestration Showdown: CLI Power vs Web Elegance
*Two approaches to the same problem. Both brilliant. Which one fits your workflow?*
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The AI coding revolution is here, and with it comes a fascinating challenge: **how do you orchestrate multiple AI agents working on your codebase without chaos?**
Two projects have emerged with distinctly different philosophies to solve this problem. **Gastown** takes the CLI-first, git-native approach beloved by infrastructure engineers. **LightSprint** offers a modern web experience with real-time collaboration and deep GitHub integration.
After diving deep into both codebases, I'm convinced they're both excellent—and that your choice depends entirely on how you like to work.
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## The Problem Both Solve
If you've tried using AI coding assistants at scale, you've hit these walls:
1. **Context Amnesia** — AI agents restart and forget what they were doing
2. **Coordination Chaos** — Multiple agents step on each other's toes
3. **Visibility Gaps** — "What is that agent even working on?"
4. **Manual Overhead** — Copying context, managing branches, tracking progress
Both Gastown and LightSprint tackle these head-on, but with radically different approaches.
---
## Gastown: The CLI Purist's Dream
Gastown is built for engineers who live in the terminal. Written in Go with an npm wrapper for easy installation, it treats **git as the source of truth** for everything.
### The Architecture
```
Town (workspace)
├── Mayor (primary AI coordinator)
├── Rigs (project containers)
│ └── Polecats (ephemeral worker agents)
└── Beads (git-backed issue tracking)
```
The genius of Gastown is the **Polecat model**—ephemeral agents that spawn, do work, and disappear. No stale sessions. No zombie processes. Names come from a pool (Mad Max themed: Furiosa, Nux, Toast...) and get recycled.
### What Gastown Does Brilliantly
**Git Worktrees for Isolation** — Each agent gets its own worktree on a unique branch. True parallel work without conflicts.
**The Mail System** — Agents can message each other, escalate blockers, and coordinate through built-in communication primitives.
**Attribution** — Every commit, every record shows exactly which agent did what (`gastown/polecats/toast`). Enterprise audit requirements? Solved.
**Formula System** — YAML templates for multi-step workflows that can be composed and reused.
### The Trade-off
Gastown requires comfort with CLI workflows. There's no web UI—you're managing everything through `gt` commands and tmux sessions. For infrastructure teams who already live in the terminal, this is a feature. For others, it's a learning curve.
---
## LightSprint: AI-Native Project Management for the Modern Team
LightSprint takes the opposite approach: **a beautiful web interface** that makes AI-powered development accessible to entire teams, not just CLI power users.
### The Experience
The moment you open LightSprint, you see your project as a **real-time Kanban board**. Tasks flow from Todo → In Progress → In Review → Done, with live updates across all connected users.
But this isn't just another project management tool. LightSprint is **AI-native from the ground up**.
### What LightSprint Does Brilliantly
**Natural Language Task Generation** — Describe what you want to build in plain English. LightSprint's AI scans your actual codebase and generates implementation-ready tasks with full context.
```
You: "Add user authentication with OAuth"
LightSprint AI:
├── Analyzes your existing auth patterns
├── Identifies related files (routes, middleware, config)
├── Generates subtasks with specific file references
└── Suggests implementation approach based on your stack
```
**Automatic Todo Completion** — This is where it gets magical. Push a commit? LightSprint's AI analyzes the changes and automatically checks off completed todos. No more "updating Jira" after every commit. Your task board stays current *because of your code*, not despite it.
**One-Click Agent Launch** — See a task? Click "Launch Agent." LightSprint spins up a cloud agent (Cursor Cloud or Claude Code Web) with full context: task description, related files, your codebase patterns, custom rules. The agent works, creates a PR, and the task auto-closes when merged.
**Deep GitHub Integration** — Your board updates the instant things happen in GitHub. PR opened? Task moves to "In Review." PR merged? Task closes. Branch deleted? Cleanup happens automatically.
**Multi-Model Flexibility** — Switch between 20+ AI models. Claude Opus for complex reasoning. GPT-4o for speed. Gemini Flash when you need it cheap. Per-user model selection means everyone can optimize their own workflow.
**Real-Time Collaboration** — Multiple team members see the same board, same updates, same AI operations in progress. Disconnect and reconnect? You automatically catch up on everything you missed.
---
## Head-to-Head Comparison
| Feature | Gastown | LightSprint |
|---------|---------|-------------|
| **Interface** | CLI + tmux | Web UI (real-time) |
| **Learning Curve** | Steep (terminal fluency required) | Gentle (familiar Kanban UX) |
| **Multi-Repo** | Excellent (built for it) | Single project focus |
| **Team Collaboration** | Via git + mail system | Real-time sync |
| **AI Task Generation** | Manual (via beads) | Natural language → tasks |
| **Auto-Tracking** | Git-native | AI-powered (automatic) |
| **Agent Launch** | `gt polecat spawn` | One-click button |
| **GitHub Integration** | Git-level | Instant sync |
| **Model Selection** | Configurable | 20+ AI models |
| **Deployment** | Self-hosted | SaaS (app.lightsprint.ai) |
| **Offline Capable** | Yes (git-based) | Yes (works offline) |
---
## When to Choose Gastown
Gastown shines when you need:
- **Multi-repo orchestration** — A "town" managing 10+ projects
- **Maximum git control** — Worktrees, bare repos, branch strategies
- **Self-hosted everything** — No external dependencies
- **CLI-centric workflows** — Your team already lives in tmux
- **Enterprise attribution** — Audit trails on every action
---
## When to Choose LightSprint
LightSprint shines when you need:
- **Team adoption** — Non-terminal users need access
- **Visual task management** — Kanban beats CLI for planning
- **Instant AI task generation** — Describe → Generate → Execute
- **Auto-tracking without effort** — Code drives task status
- **GitHub-native workflow** — PR-centric development
- **Model flexibility** — Different models for different tasks
- **Zero infrastructure** — Sign up and start
---
## The LightSprint Workflow in Action
Let me walk through what a typical session looks like:
### 1. Describe What You Want
Open LightSprint. Click "New Task." Type:
> "Add a dark mode toggle to the settings page that persists user preference"
### 2. AI Does the Research
LightSprint's agent scans your codebase:
- Finds your existing settings components
- Identifies your theme/styling approach
- Locates localStorage or preference storage patterns
- Notes your component library (shadcn? custom?)
### 3. Get Implementation-Ready Tasks
You receive:
```
Task: Add dark mode toggle to settings
├── Todo: Create ThemeToggle component in /src/components/ui/
├── Todo: Add theme context/store in /src/lib/stores/
├── Todo: Update CSS variables in /src/app.css
├── Todo: Add persistence to localStorage
├── Todo: Update Settings page to include toggle
└── Related Files: [5 files identified]
```
### 4. One-Click Implementation
Click "Launch Agent" on the task. A cloud agent spins up with:
- Full task context
- Your codebase loaded
- Custom rules you've defined
- The specific todos to complete
The agent works. You watch progress in real-time.
### 5. Automatic PR and Completion
Agent finishes → PR created automatically → You review and merge → Task closes itself.
**Total manual work: Describe the feature. Review the PR.**
---
## The Secret Sauce: Codebase Awareness
What makes LightSprint's AI generation different from "just asking ChatGPT" is **codebase awareness**.
When you describe a feature, LightSprint doesn't hallucinate file paths or assume your architecture. It actually reads:
- Your file structure
- Your existing code patterns
- Your git history and recent changes
- Your project dependencies
The result: tasks that reference *your actual files* and match *your actual patterns*.
---
## The Auto-Completion Magic
My favorite LightSprint feature is something you don't even see: **automatic todo completion**.
Traditional workflow:
1. Write code
2. Commit and push
3. Open project management tool
4. Find the task
5. Check off what you did
6. Repeat 100x/day
LightSprint workflow:
1. Write code
2. Commit and push
3. *(LightSprint AI analyzes your commit)*
4. *(Relevant todos auto-check)*
5. Done.
The AI looks at your commit message, the changed files, and the diff. It matches against your todos with confidence scoring. High confidence? Auto-complete. Low confidence? Leave for human review.
**Your task board becomes a live reflection of your codebase**, not a stale document you forgot to update.
---
## Both Are Excellent. Here's How to Decide.
**Choose Gastown if:**
- You want maximum control and git-native everything
- You're orchestrating many repos/projects
- Your team is terminal-fluent
- Self-hosting is a requirement
**Choose LightSprint if:**
- You want the fastest path from idea to implementation
- Your team includes non-terminal users
- You value automatic tracking that just works
- You want instant GitHub integration
- Model flexibility matters for your use cases
---
## Try LightSprint Today
If the workflow I described sounds like what you've been looking for—AI that understands your codebase, tasks that write themselves, agents that implement features while you review—give LightSprint a spin.
**[app.lightsprint.ai](https://app.lightsprint.ai)**
Connect your GitHub. Import a project. Describe a feature. Watch it happen.
The future of development isn't choosing between AI and human judgment. It's AI that augments human judgment—generating the tasks, doing the implementation, tracking the progress—while you focus on the decisions that matter.
LightSprint makes that future feel remarkably present.
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*Have thoughts on AI orchestration approaches? Found something that works even better? I'd love to hear about it.*
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