self-hosted · no telemetry · Windows

The agentic IDE that stays on your machine.

HYDRA pairs a Sidekick that sharpens your brief with a Lead that executes it in gated waves — every change lands as a reviewable diff, powered by your own provider keys, with zero telemetry.

Download for Windows See how it works

Account required. 48-hour offline grace.

HYDRA — mission-control refactor

Sidekick

Add exponential backoff to the provider rotator.

Draft brief: retry on 429 / quota faults with capped exponential backoff; never rotate on endpoint errors.

Cap at 3 retriesCap at 5 retriesOther…

Answer or refine the brief…

Lead — plan

✓rotator.ts — backoff policy
✓agent-tools.ts — retry hints
3config.ts — persist jitter

WAVE 1 GATE

2 files changed · 41 tests green · approve to run wave 2

ContinueBreak

rotator.ts

+9 −2

// key fault → promote standby, retry once
const backoff = (attempt: number) =>
  min(250 * 2 ** attempt, 4000);
await sleep(1000); // fixed delay
await sleep(backoff(retries));
return pool.send(req, "standby");

diff review · accept / reject per hunk

Capabilities

Built for real work

Not a chat window bolted onto an editor. HYDRA does the parts of agentic coding that most tools skip.

Plans that stay in context

The Lead emits a numbered plan and holds it for the whole run. Every wave knows what came before — no re-explaining, no drift.

Every write is a diff

Changes land in a Monaco diff view — accept or reject per hunk. Nothing touches your tree unseen, nothing merges itself.

A gate between every wave

A deterministic gate fires at every wave boundary — diff stats, test results, your call. A failed wave halts the run instead of building on sand.

Keys fail over silently

A two-slot key pool with health checks. On a 401/429 the standby key promotes, config rewrites, the request retries once — invisible to you.

Workflow

Agents propose. Gates decide. You ship.

The Sidekick→Lead loop, end to end.

01
Ask
Type the goal in plain words. No command syntax, no prompt-engineering homework.
02
Brief
The Sidekick rewrites it into a structured brief and asks at most two clarifying questions — or none.
03
Waves
The Lead executes the plan wave by wave. A gate fires at each boundary; a failed wave stops the run instead of building on sand.
04
Review
Every change lands as a diff. Accept hunks, reject hunks, or send the wave back. Nothing merges itself.

Delegation

Stop babysitting the agent

Give HYDRA the goal. It breaks the work down, builds it, tests it — and only comes back when there's a real decision to make.

Say what, not how

The Sidekick rewrites your raw request into a structured brief — asks at most two clarifying questions, then hands it to the Lead. No prompt-engineering homework, no babysitting a chat log.

Back for decisions, not babysitting

The Lead decomposes the brief, sets wave order, and pushes the work forward. When it needs a sign-off it brings results — a gate card with diffs and test output, not a question every five minutes.

Reliability

Safe to leave running

Set the goal and step away. HYDRA stops at gates for decisions, stops on faults for safety — and never touches your tree in between.

It fails closed

A failed wave stops the run. Partial work stays in the diff view as reviewable hunks — nothing half-merges, nothing slips past a gate you didn't open.

Standby takes the hit

Provider faults don't stop the run either. The key pool promotes the standby on a 401/429, rewrites config, retries once — the wave keeps moving.

Your keys stay local. Here's what actually leaves the machine.

No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting. The complete list of outbound traffic is below — and the code paths are auditable:src/main/rotator.tsfor provider calls, the license client for everything else.

Keys

Provider API keys live in%APPDATA%\Hydra\config.json. They're never sent to us — only to the provider you configured, rotated on auth faults by the ProviderRotator.

Network

Two categories, both disclosed: the AI provider endpoints you configure, and our license server atapi.gethydra.tech — checked on launch and every 6 hours, with a 48-hour offline grace period. No other outbound calls.

Data

The license server receives four things: account email, HYDRA version, OS, and a random per-install ID. Nothing about your code, files, keystrokes, project names, or command output.

In the box

Everything the Lead needs is already installed

No plugin hunt, no toolchain wrangling. These ship with the installer.

agent-tools.ts

15 native tools

fs read/write/search/glob, git status/diff/log/blame, run/build/test/lint, typecheck and deps diagnostics — real subprocesses, not wrappers.

xterm.js

Real terminal, built in

xterm.js over node-pty ConPTY shells, plus a dedicated agent terminal tab. JetBrains Mono, hydra-dark palette.

hydra-dark

Monaco, themed dark

The hydra-dark theme ships in the box: blood-red keywords, cold-violet types, italic comments. Multi-tab with per-file models.

Auditable

Read the code

Every claim on this page resolves to a file. These three are the whole story.

src/main/rotator.ts

The network story

The key pool, every outbound provider call, the failover logic. Count the URLs — it's the complete list.

src/main/agent.ts

The loop

Sidekick brief → Lead plan → wave execution. Where gates fire, where runs halt.

src/main/agent-tools.ts

The toolbox

All 15 tools the Lead can call, and the exact subprocesses behind each one.

Get HYDRA

That repo you've been
meaning to fix? Ship it.

Free, self-hosted, single installer. Point it at a workspace and a provider key and it's working.

Download for Windows

v0.1.0 · Windows x64 · NSIS installer

A HYDRA account is required. The installer will ask you to sign in or create one on first launch.

Windows 10/11, 64-bit
~300 MB on disk
Your own provider key — two slots, primary + standby
No telemetry, no analytics, no phone-home