New tool2026-11-02via GitHubAI Agents That Do Tasks for You

skein

Name: skein
Author: Balanov (GitHub), published as a Paritet open-source project

Skein is an open-source Go command-line tool that runs local agent swarms as explicit task graphs with bounded concurrency, and whose emergency stop invalidates queued work and rejects late results from the stopped run.

Visit skein ↗Release notes ↗

Free (open source)MITGo (1.26+ to build from source)★ 257 (as of 2026-11-03)by Balanov (GitHub), published as a Paritet open-source project

Why it matters

For developers running many coding or research agents in parallel on one machine. When you hit stop, Skein makes sure queued tasks don't start and stragglers can't report back as if nothing happened.

Highlights

A persistent epoch fence and idempotent stop latch: skein stop bumps the epoch, queued work is invalidated and late completions from the old epoch are rejected.
Task manifests are JSON, with argv arrays (no implicit shell), dependency graphs, reusable multi-pass blocks, worker limits and per-pass timeouts.
Kills tracked local process trees on Linux, macOS and Windows, and writes report.json and events.jsonl for each run.
Ships as one static binary with no daemon or database, and can be embedded as a Go library.
The author reports faster scheduling than Python asyncio and LangGraph on 1,000-node graphs in local tests on one Windows machine, while noting asyncio was faster at 100 tasks.unverified

Taken from the project's own README, docs or launch page. Claims about speed or accuracy are the maker's unless stated otherwise.

Try it if: You run a swarm of local agents or scripts and need a stop button that really stops everything.

Worth knowing: Version 0.2.0 is an early release. The README says it does not sandbox commands, authenticate leases, validate agent output or cover remote work; commands run with your user's permissions. The README's install one-liner pipes a script to the shell, so review it first or download a release binary.

Quick facts

Pricing	Free
Free or paid	Free (open source)
License	MIT
Language	Go (1.26+ to build from source)
Platform	Linux, macOS, Windows (amd64 and arm64); local CLI
GitHub stars	★ 257 (as of 2026-11-03)
Maker	Balanov (GitHub), published as a Paritet open-source project

Related ranking

See how established tools compare in Best AI Agents That Do Tasks for You. New releases aren't scored until we review them against the rubric.

What we couldn't verify

highlights[4] (benchmarks are the author's own local measurements)

Checked 2026-11-03 from the tool's own pages. Prices and star counts change, so confirm on the official site. Listing here is not a ranking or an endorsement.