What is Birch?

Birch turns the “assign a task to an AI agent” loop into a desktop workflow: a task arrives in your Inbox, one click launches an agent in a fresh, isolated workspace, you watch its status from the sidebar, review the full diff of what it did, and open the pull request — all while your own checkout stays untouched. It is also a complete Git client on its own, so none of this requires using AI at all.

The core loop

1. A task comes in. The Inbox collects issues assigned to you from GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Jira, Linear, and YouTrack, alongside PR activity and agent events.
2. One click starts a workspace. Birch creates a new git worktree on a new branch off the base branch and opens an embedded terminal there with your chosen agent — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or a custom command — already running. The task lands in the agent’s input as an editable draft; you press Enter to send it.
3. You watch, then review. Each workspace row in the sidebar carries a live status indicator: working, waiting for your input, or done. When the agent finishes, the workspace’s Review tab shows everything the worktree changed versus its base branch — committed, staged, unstaged, and untracked — in one diff.
4. You ship. Create PR in the workspace properties panel opens a dialog prefilled from the agent’s own session title and the branch’s commits.

Because every workspace is its own worktree, you can run several agents in parallel, each on its own branch, and nothing they do can dirty your working copy. That model is the heart of Birch — see the worktree-first model.

Screen tour

• Sidebar — the Inbox entry with a count badge, your repositories (recent and all), and each repository’s workspaces with agent-brand icons and live status discs. A collapsed rail keeps the top working/waiting workspaces one click away.
• Inbox — everything that needs you, in tabs All / AI / PR / Tasks: assigned issues, PR activity, and agent sessions waiting for input. Rows can be pinned, snoozed, or dismissed.
• Repositories dashboard — the fleet view: a needs-attention list, active agents, workspaces created, your commits, an activity chart, and Claude Code usage statistics. See Dashboard.
• Repository page — one repository’s commit graph, open pull requests, and workspaces. Opened by clicking a repository in the sidebar. See Repository page.
• Workspace screen — the agent terminal, any extra terminal tabs, a full Git tab for the worktree (changes, history, stash, review), and a properties panel with the agent status, PR state, and branch details.

What Birch is not

• Not a hosted service. Birch has no backend of its own: your repositories, worktrees, and its database all live on your machine, and agents run locally in embedded terminals — authenticated by your own agent-CLI subscription or API keys.
• Not merge-only. It is a full Git client. You can use it purely for commits, history, branches, and conflicts and never touch an agent.
• Not a new kind of Git. Birch drives the standard git command line against standard worktrees; everything it creates is visible to plain git and to any other tool.

Feature highlights

Feature	Learn more
Agent workspaces — isolated worktrees with an embedded terminal running Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, or a custom command	Agent workspaces
Live agent status — per-workspace working / waiting / done indicators, pushed by the birch-status plugin	birch-status plugin
Inbox — assigned issues, PR activity, and waiting agents in one triage list	Inbox
Full Git client — staging, history graph, branches, stash, conflict resolver, word-level diffs	Commit changes
Pull requests — create PRs on GitHub, GitLab, and Azure DevOps in the app, track their status, and merge them via the birch CLI	Create a pull request
AI code review — automatic review of new PRs via the Anthropic API	AI code review
Issue trackers — Jira, Linear, and YouTrack feed the Inbox and can update issue status as you work	Integrations
birch CLI — scriptable worktree, PR, and review commands with --json output	CLI reference

What you need

• git — Birch drives your installed git from the command line, so git must be installed and on your PATH.
• An agent CLI (optional, recommended) — Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode for agent workspaces. Each runs on your own subscription or its own key; Birch never proxies agent traffic.
• Provider tokens (optional) — a personal access token per account for GitHub, GitLab, or Azure DevOps (PRs and tasks) and for Jira, Linear, or YouTrack (tasks). Tokens are stored in the system keychain. See Integrations.
• ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (optional) — enables the Anthropic API features such as AI code review and commit-message generation. See AI in Birch and Anthropic API key.

Where to go next

• The worktree-first model — why isolation is the default
• AI in Birch — which features use your agent CLI and which use the Anthropic API
• Quickstart — the whole loop, hands-on