self-hosted · local-first · your keys
There are a thousand identical AI IDEs now. Dorodango isn’t one of them. It’s for people who love Claude Code in a terminal tab — and think the tab is basically enough. It replaces nothing: every session is the authentic thing, on your machine, with your keys. It just gives the work the patient, repeated passes a tab can’t — the way you polish mud into a mirror.
the name
Hikaru dorodango is a Japanese craft: you pack a handful of dirt into a ball, then dust and burnish it — for hours, sometimes days, each pass with finer soil than the last — until the thing is mirror-bright. No glaze, no paint, nothing added. It was always just mud; it was never polished before.
You type a sentence about a change you want. It is not a spec and nobody pretends it is — design asks the questions that would have made it one.
Plan, build, review, test. Each phase is a finer grit than the last, run by an agent with its own model, effort and prompt — and every build iteration lands on trunk while it is still small.
Nothing was replaced or generated over the top. What ships is your repo, your commits, your history — worked until you can see yourself in it.
That is the whole product thesis. The patience is the harness’s job — the phases, the gates, the landing, the recovery. Yours is knowing what the thing should look like when it is done.
the model
Every card is a real Claude Code session — same engine, same login, same feel as your tab. The lanes give it shape: each is a kind of work with its own model, effort, and prompt. Drag a card and the session does that work.
Explore the problem and shape the intent — the agent asks the questions that change the outcome.
Turn intent into an executable plan sized to the task, with its own model and reasoning effort.
Implement in small compiling chunks, landing each iteration on trunk as it goes. Never skippable.
A fix-up loop over the whole session’s work — not a gate. Findings get fixed and landed immediately.
A blind, independent tester verifies the result against its brief alone. No access to the build context.
fast-track
Small tasks skip the phases they don’t need — a one-line fix doesn’t
get a design ceremony. The policy is pure and size-aware; only build is sacred.
trunk landing
Work integrates continuously. A session commits small, compiling chunks and lands each one onto trunk as it goes — parallel sessions absorb each other’s work in near-real-time, and nobody drifts for a week on a stale branch. Dorodango owns the git mechanics as a two-actor split:
A land squashes the branch’s committed delta onto trunk with pure git plumbing — merge-tree → commit-tree → update-ref under a compare-and-swap retry. It never touches a worktree, and it’s exactly-once across server restarts.
Between turns it reconciles onto the latest trunk — resetting once its delta has landed, pulling siblings’ work in. Worktrees are persistent warm workbenches, kept across done.
Every land must compile and typecheck before it touches trunk. A real conflict re-engages the agent to pull and re-land — it never silently drops work or tears the session down.
Each session sees which sibling sessions touch the same files — and what they’re trying to do — so agents coordinate instead of clobbering each other.
The human-readable release branch stays clean: completed sessions pile into a release candidate that gets a release-wide review and full verification before it ships.
preview & devtools
One click starts the app, another opens it right here, with Dorodango’s devtools overlaid on it: element picker, chat, and diagnostics, right where the pixels are.
Press play — or ask the session to start it — and the app runs on its own ports with an in-app preview: a warm iframe pool that auto-heals when the server restarts. No terminal juggling, no localhost guessing.
An overlay injected into the previewed app itself — Shadow-DOM isolated, so it never leaks styles into your app or breaks it.
Point the element picker at a button and tell the session what to change. The agent gets eyes and hands on the running app — and you get diagnostics without opening a console.
you⌖ this button — make it match the accent
session 41done — landed in iteration 3 ✓
console 0 errors · network 12/12 · hydrated 84ms
anywhere
Dorodango runs on your machine — but the sessions keep working after you stand up. Put it on your tailnet and the full UI is on your phone — full parity, not a companion app, included — watch the feed, answer clarifications, approve exit gates from the couch, the train, the queue for coffee.
LAN access modes
offlocalhost only — the default
selected interfacese.g. just your tailnet address
allevery interface, your call
Pairs perfectly with Tailscale — no ports opened to the internet, no reverse proxy, just your devices.
build ▸ iteration 4 landed ✓ b41c2e0
clarification · session 41
Ship the new modes behind a feature flag?
exit gate · review → test
2 findings fixed, ready to advance.
steering
Most tools are racing to take you out of the loop. Dorodango is for people who never wanted out. The agent does the work; you shape intent and approve where it counts. Exit gates set how much say you want, per project and per phase — and clarifications come to you as questions, not as stalled jobs.
Actually — keep the old CLI flag working, just alias it.
Queued. I’ll fold it into this iteration — the flag stays as a deprecated alias, warning once.
Chat with a session while it works. Messages sent mid-turn are queued and delivered exactly once — never swallowed, never double-run, surviving crashes and reconnects. Errors surface; nothing strands silently.
spec-driven
Four documents describe a project beyond its code, and Dorodango injects them into every build-side phase — so each task improves both the product and its own description of itself. The test phase stays blind on purpose: an independent tester judges against its brief alone.
why it exists
the north star — changes rarely, never as a side effect of a task
what it is now
the living spec — build keeps it current, review flags it stale
how we build
the engineering stance every phase must honor
how to run it
commands, ports, repo facts — the layer you already know
pricing
Dorodango runs on your machine with your own API keys, so what you pay for is the harness — not tokens, not seats you aren’t using. A 7-day trial starts at first boot with no account, no card and no phone-home.
$19/mo
or $190/yr
One person, 3 machines — laptop, desktop, the box in the corner. The same human, wherever they sit down.
$99/mo
for 5 seats · +$19/mo per extra seat
A team on one shared server: named people on the same board, chat, attribution and presence. Group is what buys multi-user — it is not a bulk rate on Personal.
Negotiated
seats and machines to suit
Run the licence server yourself, or go fully air-gapped. Private tooling, not publicly distributed.
Group is not a volume discount. $99 across 5 seats works out slightly above Personal’s $19 a head, and that is deliberate: Personal has no multi-user support, so five people cannot buy five Personals and share a board. What Group sells is the collaboration, not a cheaper seat.
| Plan detail | Personal | Group | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $19/mo or $190/yr | $99/mo for 5 seats (min), +$19/mo per extra seat | negotiated |
| Seats | 1 | ≥5 | negotiated |
| Installations ("machines") | 3 | 1 | negotiated |
| Multi-user | no | yes | yes |
| License server | Dorodango-hosted | Dorodango-hosted | customer-run, or air-gapped |
| Tooling | public | public | private — not publicly distributed |
Local or remote, the price is the same — a laptop is a machine and a bastion is a machine.
early access
Founders licences are free for 90 days. One per account, 1 seat, 3 machines — the Personal shape, no card, while the programme lasts.
Claim a founders licence The claim page says whether the programme is still open.get started
Dorodango is built with Dorodango — its own friction is the most important bug report it gets. It runs on your machine, with your API keys, against your git repos. Nothing leaves your laptop unless an agent you steered pushes it.
# run it — Node ≥ 20 and git are all you need
$ npx dorodango # opens on :47317
# or keep it around
$ npm install -g dorodango
# point it at a repo, drop a task in design, move the card