Why we built Deska

Deska exists because of a feeling every developer knows too well. You sit down to build something, and before you write a single line you are already juggling windows. The editor is on one monitor, three terminals are stacked behind it, a browser holds fourteen tabs of documentation, your notes live in another app entirely, and the AI agent you asked to refactor a module is buried somewhere under all of it. The tools are excellent. The way they are arranged is chaos.

We spent years working like that, and we watched the arrival of AI coding agents make the chaos worse instead of better. Every agent brought its own window, its own session, its own little island of context. We were delegating more work than ever and somehow spending more time just keeping track of where everything was. This post is the story of why we built Deska, and the four convictions that shaped it.

The problem we kept tripping over

A modern development session is not one program. It is a small fleet of programs that all point at the same project. Your editor shows the code. Your terminal runs the build. Your browser renders the result and holds the docs. Your notes capture the decisions. And now your agents do real chunks of the work, reading the same files, running the same commands, editing the same tree.

Operating systems still treat these as unrelated rectangles. Nothing about your window manager knows that the terminal in the corner and the editor filling the screen belong to the same idea. So you become the integration layer. You remember which terminal was running the dev server. You alt tab through a pile to find the agent that finished ten minutes ago. You lose the note where you wrote down why you chose one approach over another. The mental overhead is invisible until you add it up, and then it is enormous.

One infinite canvas, not another window manager

Our first conviction is that the workspace should match how projects actually feel in your head: a map, not a stack. In Deska, every tool is a panel on a single infinite canvas. Your editor goes in the middle. The terminals that serve it sit below. The browser preview lives to the right, next to the documentation you keep glancing at. Notes and task lists pin themselves wherever they make sense. You zoom out and see the whole project at a glance. You zoom in and work inside one panel.

Spatial memory turns out to be the feature nobody asked for and everybody uses. After a day, you stop searching for things. The test terminal is always in the same place because you put it there. The agent reviewing your pull request is over on the left, where reviewing things lives. The canvas remembers its layout per workspace, so each project keeps its own geography and switching between projects feels like walking between rooms instead of reshuffling a desk.

Agents live on the canvas with you

Our second conviction is that AI coding agents are not a chat window bolted onto the side of an editor. They are workers in your project, and they deserve the same visibility as your own terminals and files. In Deska an agent is a panel like any other. You watch it read your code, run your tests and edit your tree in real time, from the same surface where you do those things yourself.

Claude Code, Codex and opencode, side by side

We did not want to pick a winner, so Deska runs the agents you already use. Claude Code, Codex and opencode each get first class panels, and you can run several at once on different parts of the same project. One agent drafts the migration while another writes the tests while you review the diff in your editor two panels away. Because everything shares the canvas, supervising three parallel streams of work feels natural instead of reckless. The agents are not hidden in tabs you forget to check. They are visibly working, right there on the desk.

Say it out loud with Ask Deska

Our third conviction is that your voice is the fastest input device you own, and software has been wasting it. Ask Deska lets you talk to your workspace. Say what you want, and it happens: open a terminal in the service folder, run the test suite, ask an agent to find where the retry logic lives, pin the staging logs next to the browser. Voice is not a gimmick layered on top of the canvas. It works because the canvas gives it somewhere sensible to act. When everything has a place, a spoken instruction can put things in their place.

It changes the rhythm of a session more than we expected. You stay in flow because your hands never leave the keyboard to go hunting for a panel. You think out loud and the desk rearranges itself around the thought.

Your desk follows you to your phone

Work does not pause politely when you step away from the computer. An agent finishes a task while you are making coffee. A build fails while you are on the train. Our fourth conviction is that your workspace should not be trapped on the machine that runs it. With Deska on your phone, you pick up exactly where the canvas left off. You check the agent that just completed, read its summary, approve the next step or tell it to try again. You glance at the terminal that matters, answer the notification that just arrived, and go back to your day.

This is not a remote desktop view squeezed onto a small screen. It is a continuation of the same workspace, designed for the moments when you are away from it. The desktop keeps running the work; the phone keeps you in charge of it.

Local-first and free forever

Underneath everything sits a conviction about who your work belongs to. Deska is local-first. Your files stay on your machine, your sessions run on your machine, and the app is fully useful with no account at all. We built the product we wanted to trust: one that never holds your code hostage, never routes your project through someone else’s servers to be useful, and never turns into a subscription you must feed to keep your own workspace.

The core app is free forever. Not a trial, not a teaser tier with the good parts locked away. The canvas, the panels, the agents, the voice control, the phone companion: the workspace is yours. We make money from managed conveniences on top, for people who want our infrastructure doing the heavy lifting, and we think that is the honest way to fund a tool developers live inside all day.

What happens next

Deska is what we wished existed every time we lost twenty minutes to window archaeology. One infinite canvas where your editor, terminal, browser, notes and AI agents finally share an address. A workspace you can talk to. A desk that travels to your pocket. A tool that respects that your machine is yours.

If that sounds like the way you want to build, download Deska and set up your first desk in about a minute. This blog is where we will document what we learn making it, from the design decisions behind the canvas to the details of running coding agents well. We are just getting started, and we are glad you are here at the beginning.