openwork: the open-source answer to Claude Cowork
Every time Anthropic ships something that lands, a clone army forms within weeks. Claude Cowork, the general-computing agent Anthropic launched in January and pushed to web and mobile in July, just got its open-source shadow. It's called openwork, from the team behind opencode, and it's spent the last day near the top of GitHub trending with close to 800 new stars in 24 hours, sitting around 19k total.
What it actually is: a free desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux for building and sharing AI workflows. The pitch is that skills and connected services you set up once become reusable across tools, machines and teammates. It's powered by opencode under the hood, and it exposes everything through an MCP server, so you don't even have to use their desktop app, you can drive openwork's skills from Claude Code, Cursor or Codex directly.
The interesting layer is OpenWork Den, a control plane for organizations: user provisioning, team management, skill publishing, policy enforcement. That's the part that signals ambition beyond a hobby clone. Cowork's whole thesis is the super individual who operates a fleet of agents at the file-system level; openwork is trying to make that thesis multiplayer and self-hostable.
Whether it wins depends on the usual open-source question: does the community actually publish skills into it, or does it stay a thin shell around opencode. But the direction is unmistakable. The moment agent workflows became a product category, they became a thing people want to own rather than rent. Repo is at github.com/different-ai/openwork.
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What it actually is: a free desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux for building and sharing AI workflows. The pitch is that skills and connected services you set up once become reusable across tools, machines and teammates. It's powered by opencode under the hood, and it exposes everything through an MCP server, so you don't even have to use their desktop app, you can drive openwork's skills from Claude Code, Cursor or Codex directly.
The interesting layer is OpenWork Den, a control plane for organizations: user provisioning, team management, skill publishing, policy enforcement. That's the part that signals ambition beyond a hobby clone. Cowork's whole thesis is the super individual who operates a fleet of agents at the file-system level; openwork is trying to make that thesis multiplayer and self-hostable.
Whether it wins depends on the usual open-source question: does the community actually publish skills into it, or does it stay a thin shell around opencode. But the direction is unmistakable. The moment agent workflows became a product category, they became a thing people want to own rather than rent. Repo is at github.com/different-ai/openwork.
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