The premise is simple. Coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and OpenCode are capable, but they work best when you hand them clear workflows, honest constraints, and good tools. App Automaton packages those things in forms you can clone, symlink, and use the same day. Everything is plain text first, portable across agents, and shaped by daily use inside the studio.
Skills that teach agents workflows
The flagship is agent-designer, a portable skills workspace with issue-driven planning and bridge scripts that let one agent consult another without losing the session. It has its own deep-dive page. Around it sit document-SKILLs for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF work, presentation for consulting-quality decks, and webmaton for web research with grounded citations.
Harnesses that keep agents honest
automaton is a stage-gated harness that walks an agent from framing through planning, review, execution, and verification, with durable state in the repository. automux orchestrates several agents at once in tmux, each in its own git worktree, coordinating through files. Smaller tools such as markmaton handle the sharp edges, like turning HTML into clean Markdown.
Models that run on the laptop
A third shelf is pure MLX work for Apple Silicon, with no cloud and no PyTorch. mlx-speech covers speech synthesis, voice cloning, and recognition. tnt-asr is a terminal voice-to-text tool that transcribes in about a second. ltx-video-mlx generates video with synchronized audio on device. mlx-spatial reconstructs 3D from images, turning photos into meshes, Gaussian splats, and point clouds.
Repositories to start with
- appautomaton/document-SKILLs
Claude Code and Codex SKILLs for PDF, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint work: extraction, forms, formulas, and tracked changes, adapted from Anthropic's skills.
- appautomaton/presentation
Claude Code and Codex SKILLs for consulting-quality decks: strategy storyboarding, brand-system identity, and pixel-perfect PDF or editable PPTX output.
- appautomaton/webmaton
Portable web-research and browser-automation SKILLs for Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode: Playwright, Chrome DevTools, nodriver, and HTML to Markdown.
- appautomaton/mlx-speech
Pure-MLX speech synthesis, voice cloning, dialogue, sound effects, and ASR for Apple Silicon: Fish S2 Pro, VibeVoice, LongCat, MOSS, Step-Audio, and Cohere ASR.
- appautomaton/tnt-asr
A terminal voice-to-text TUI built on mlx-speech. Qwen3-ASR on the Apple GPU, fully local, no PyTorch, transcribes in about a second.
Where to start
The App Automaton site gives the full tour, including the anatomy of a skill and a three-command quickstart. If you would rather read code, start with agent-designer on GitHub and work outward. Everything is MIT licensed, and issues and pull requests are welcome across the organization.