Binteca Research Based Coding Workspace

What it is

Cologic — by Binteca — is the Binteca Research Based Coding Workspace: a macOS desktop app for local-first coding with projects, sessions, the sandboxed shell, custom MCP connectors, skills, provenance, and one fundamental product decision: the agent is a coder that researches first.

Research before code

Every dependency and API a change relies on is checked against a primary source before the code is written, and the response says what was checked and when.

Your folder, not a sandbox

A project can declare a workspace folder on your Mac. Sessions run there; the agent reads, edits, runs tests and commits inside it.

Your Claude or Codex

The engine is Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or CodeBuddy, connected in the app with your own subscription login or API key. No .env files.

Install

Download Cologic 3.0.0 (GitHub access required) for Apple Silicon (macOS 12 or newer). Sign in with an account that has access to the private repository. Verify the SHA256 checksum.
Open the DMG and drag Cologic into Applications.
The build is ad-hoc signed, not notarised. On first launch macOS may say the app is from an unidentified developer: right-click the app, choose Open, and confirm once. If a previous copy is installed, remove it first — one install per Mac.

State and Data. Cologic keeps its own state in ~/.cologic. Session run data lives in ~/Cologic. Existing installations migrate automatically; approve macOS Keychain access when prompted.

First run

Four guided steps:

Environment — compatibility, storage, keychain and network checks.
Data location — where session data and uploads live.
Agent runtime — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or CodeBuddy. Cologic can install an app-managed runtime; no Node, npm or admin password needed.
Model provider — sign in with an existing Claude or Codex subscription, or enter a provider API key. The connection is tested before you continue.

Workspace folder

This is the change that makes Cologic a coder. In New project or Project Settings there is a Workspace folder field with a Choose… button. Pick the folder your code lives in — for example ~/Projects/my-app.

Every new session in that project starts with the folder as its working directory.
The agent's file tools read and write inside the folder (and nowhere else, unless you grant more folders — see below).
The sandboxed shell may write inside the folder, including its .git, so npm test, pip install -e . and git commit work. Shell commands start in a managed data directory, so the agent prefixes project commands with cd <folder> &&.
Run in terminal: a shell command in the agent's message carries a Run button. It executes in the Terminal pane beside the conversation — your own login shell, starting in the workspace folder, where you can type an ssh or sudo password — and when it finishes its output is sent back to the agent automatically as a Ran … · output sent to the agent row. Only what the terminal printed is sent, never what you typed. The agent can also read the pane with its read_terminal tool; it cannot type into it.
Leave the field empty and the project behaves like upstream: a managed folder under the data location, and generated files delivered as Artifacts.

A missing folder is an error, not a fallback. If the declared folder no longer exists, starting a session fails with a clear message instead of quietly working somewhere you did not choose.

Research vs deep research

Depth	When	What happens
Research (default)	Every code task	Quick, targeted checks of the facts the change depends on: current stable version of each package (`pip index versions`, `npm view … version`, `go list -m -versions`, `cargo search`), the documented API of each call, current tooling conventions. The response lists what was checked, the version found, the source and the date.
Deep research	When you ask — say "deep research", or pick the Deep Research skill with `/`	A structured survey: at least three primary sources, two to four approaches compared on fit, maintenance, stability and cost, a dated findings record shown before any code is designed, then the verified specifics the implementation will use.

Both are ordinary skills you can read in the app under Skills: Research-First Coding (always on) and Deep Research. The behaviour is also part of the agent's system prompt, so it applies with every runtime and model.

Cologic never rewrites your code to a newer idiom on its own: where a project pins a version or uses an older pattern on purpose, it keeps the project consistent and says so.

To point the agent at something it said earlier, select the text in the message. The toolbar that appears offers Attach selection as context, which sends the quote with your next message in one press, and Annotate, which does the same with a note attached.

Files, network and approvals

Granted folders

Beyond the workspace folder, the composer's Your files → Grant folder… menu lets you grant more folders read-only or read & write. Cologic honours those grants in the agent's file tools as well as in the shell sandbox, so a granted folder is readable (and writable if you said so) everywhere.

Network

Shell and REPL processes reach the network through an allow-list. The first time a command needs a new host — a package registry, a docs site — Cologic asks; allow once or always. Package registries used for version checks fall under the same rule.

Voice

Press the microphone in the composer to dictate; press it again and the take is transcribed by ElevenLabs Scribe into your draft. A reply to a dictated message is read aloud in the voice you choose under Settings → Voice, where one API key (verified before it is stored, kept encrypted) turns the feature on. No local model is involved; audio leaves the machine the way a prompt sent to a hosted model does.

The terminal

The Terminal pane is your shell, not the agent's: nothing runs there unless you press Run or type it yourself, and the sandbox does not apply to it — it is Terminal.app with the agent watching the output. Passwords typed at an echo-off prompt never enter the output stream. What the agent receives is bounded (the first 24 KB and the last 8 KB of a long run) and appears in the transcript as an ordinary message, so it survives a restart.

Actions that always ask

Deploying or undeploying, pushing or publishing, running anything on another machine, recursive deletes and history rewrites, and generating media on a paid account each show an approval card in every approval mode, Full access included — and no remembered grant covers them. The card says which kind of action it is and why it asks.

Deploy access

The allow-list is an HTTP proxy, so it cannot carry SSH: out of the box a session can neither git push over SSH nor reach a server, and it cannot read ~/.ssh. Deploy access, a per-project switch in Project Settings — on by default for a project with a workspace folder — gives that project's sessions what your own terminal has: direct connections on ports 22 and 443, the system resolver, ssh-agent, ~/.ssh read-write, and your git, gh and keychain identity read-only. Deploy tooling that lives outside the workspace — a control-plane checkout, a CLI — is granted read-write under Files, and the folder it scans to resolve names read-only. While the switch is on, direct connections on those two ports are not filtered by the allow-list; every other port stays closed. Turn the switch off to close all of it.

Approvals

Each session has an approval mode. Edits inside the workspace, reads and searches can be auto-approved; anything else asks. The agent never bypasses a denial and never reports an action that was blocked as done.

What the agent will not do

Commit unless asked.
Force-push, reset --hard, clean -f, branch -D or rewrite history — those stay with you and your own shell.
Delete files or folders the task did not name.

Command line

Settings → General offers to install the cologic command. It drives the same app headlessly: create projects, run tasks, manage connectors. The Task API accepts an explicit working directory per task and exposes each project's workspacePath in its session defaults.

cologic --help

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/chmjdev/cologic.git
cd cologic
npm ci --no-audit          # Node 22; install scripts for electron/esbuild/prisma are allow-listed
npm run typecheck && npm test
npm run build:mac          # dist/cologic-<version>-mac-arm64.dmg

macOS only. Windows and Linux packaging were removed from this fork on purpose.

Credits and licence

Cologic is a fork of AIPOCH Open-Science by AIPOCH and is released under the Apache License 2.0. Upstream copyright notices are preserved in LICENSE and NOTICE.