Comparison
Nix Agents and Orca: what we forked and what we changed
Nix Agents began as a fork of Orca, an MIT-licensed agent workspace by Lovecast Inc. That is a fact about this codebase, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving to a diff.
What Orca is
Orca is an open-source workspace for running coding agents: a desktop shell that hosts terminals, agent sessions and project context in one window. It is MIT-licensed, which is what makes a fork legal and normal rather than awkward.
The base is good. It solved the hard structural part — a desktop app that can host real terminals and several agent sessions without becoming a browser tab with extra steps.
What changed here
The fork is not a rebrand. The parts that were rewritten or added are:
- The five modes — Agent, Code, Chat, Loop and Swarm — as the organising idea of the board.
- Windows terminals: real PTY sessions, which is the reason the project started.
- Worktree and merge-queue handling for parallel agents.
- The skills system, the local vault and the agent-browser integration.
- The design system, the site you are reading, and the brand.
Why it is worth saying
Two reasons. First, the MIT licence means the lineage is not a secret to be managed — attribution is the price of the licence and it is a fair price.
Second, if you are choosing a tool, you should know which half of it is a mature upstream and which half is a beta by a small lab. Nix Agents is currently in beta. The upstream is not, and that is exactly why the fork was worth making.