helmdeck

Today's helmdeck install ran a full 6-step code-edit loop (clone, read, patch, test, commit, push) on gpt-oss-120b for $0.07. The same loop on Cursor or Claude Code direct via Sonnet would have cost $0.30+. Same outcome, ~5× cheaper — and the "expensive" stack isn't even the most expensive option.

Most browser agents require GPT-4o or Claude Sonnet to work reliably. Helmdeck is built for the other 99% of deployments — local 7B models, air-gapped environments, and teams that can't send credentials to a cloud API. It wraps every browser, desktop, git, and code action into a single typed JSON call that even a small model can fill in correctly. The numbers above are the consequence: when packs absorb the work the LLM would otherwise burn tokens rediscovering, cheap or local models do agentic work that frontier-model APIs charge 10× more for.

A self-hosted, containerized platform for AI agents, exposed as Capability Packs — schema-validated, one-shot JSON tools — and native MCP. The defining metric is ≥90% pack success on 7B–30B-class open-weight models, something no frontier-targeting competitor is optimizing for.

📊 Full per-task comparison with reproduction recipe at https://helmdeck.dev/explanation/why-helmdeck. These are one maintainer's findings; we welcome community reproductions.

Why this exists

Smart models thrive on bash and a README. Weak models stall on open-ended interfaces. Helmdeck closes that gap by hiding browser sessions, desktop actions, credentials, and multi-step workflows behind single typed REST / MCP calls.

Three audiences specifically:

• Self-hosted AI teams who can't leave their VPC and need MCP-native infra that doesn't phone home.
• The LocalLLaMA / Ollama crowd running 7B–30B models — pack contracts keep small models reliable where open-ended tool surfaces fail.
• Security-sensitive orgs who need agents to log into SaaS apps without the model ever seeing a credential (vault-backed placeholder tokens + MCP-level audit).

Status

v0.22.0 shipped — agents that work on free models, with memory. The release closes ADRs 047–050:

• Pipeline routing + routing memory (ADR 047) — the helmdeck.route meta-pack recommends the best pack/pipeline for an intent (with structured gap warnings when nothing fits), backed by per-caller learned defaults surfaced through the helmdeck://routing-guide and helmdeck://my-defaults MCP resources and a Routing Memory management UI.
• Memory write surface + OpenClaw bridge (ADR 048) — helmdeck.memory_store persists durable user facts (read back via helmdeck://my-memory), an optional embedding sidecar powers OpenClaw's memory_search, and a QMD corpus bridge exposes helmdeck memory to OpenClaw.
• Intent decomposition (ADR 049) — helmdeck.plan turns a multi-action prompt into an ordered, pipeline-aware step plan plus a rewritten_prompt.
• LLM context manager (ADR 050) — internal/llmcontext compacts catalog-heavy prompts to fit small-model context budgets (tiered per-model budgets, cascading select + lexical rank, optional two-pass filter), surfaced through helmdeck://context-budgets and helmdeck://my-plans.

57 capability packs ship in the control-plane binary (47 without an AI gateway configured), alongside 21 built-in pipelines, a community pack marketplace (helmdeck pack install <name>), and operator-supplied cmd.* subprocess packs. Earlier headline features remain: end-to-end content chaining (image.generate auto-feeds podcast/slides/blog covers), the helmdeck://image-models MCP resource, image-mode install (./scripts/install.sh --image-mode), and the Pack Test Runner UI. Helmdeck is published to the official MCP Registry as io.github.tosin2013/helmdeck for one-line install in registry-aware clients. Phases 1–6.5 are complete; the current milestone is v1.0 — Kubernetes & GA (Phase 7), with backlog materialised as GitHub issues tagged good first issue and help wanted.

• 49 ADRs in docs/adrs/ — every architectural decision with PRD back-references
• Task breakdown in docs/TASKS.md — ~85 tasks across 8 phases with critical path
• GitHub milestones in docs/MILESTONES.md — drop-in issue checklists with current ship state
• Pack reference in docs/PACKS.md — every shipped pack's input/output contract

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/tosin2013/helmdeck
cd helmdeck
./scripts/install.sh

That's it. The script runs preflight checks (docker, node ≥20, go ≥1.26, make, openssl, curl) with platform-aware install hints, generates fresh secrets into deploy/compose/.env.local (chmod 600), builds the Management UI bundle, the Go binaries, and the browser sidecar image, brings the Compose stack up, and prints the URL plus a freshly generated admin password.

✓ helmdeck is up

  URL:       http://localhost:3000
  Username:  admin
  Password:  <generated; printed once — save it now>

Useful flags:

• ./scripts/install.sh --reset — tear down, regenerate secrets, reinstall (new admin password)
• ./scripts/install.sh --no-build — skip build steps, just bring the stack up
• ./scripts/install.sh --help — full flag reference

Or via make: make install.

Connect a client

A running stack is just the platform — the value is packs called by an agent. Wire one of the supported MCP clients to your fresh install:

Once a client is connected, work through the pack-demo-playbook.md — 20+ copy-pasteable prompts that exercise every pack. The per-pack reference covers each pack's contract, error codes, and chained workflows.

Advanced: manual setup

If you'd rather drive each step yourself instead of running the install script:

# 1. Build the Management UI bundle (needs Node 20+)
make web-deps && make web-build

# 2. Build the control-plane binary with the UI embedded
make build

# 3. Run the control plane with admin credentials
HELMDECK_JWT_SECRET=$(openssl rand -hex 32) \
HELMDECK_VAULT_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 32) \
HELMDECK_ADMIN_PASSWORD=changeme \
./bin/control-plane

Or use the Compose stack directly (control plane + Garage object store + bundled init):

cp deploy/compose/.env.example deploy/compose/.env.local
# …edit deploy/compose/.env.local and fill in real secrets…
docker compose -f deploy/compose/compose.yaml --env-file deploy/compose/.env.local up -d

Logging in to the Management UI

The login endpoint accepts a static admin password set via the HELMDECK_ADMIN_PASSWORD env var on the control plane process. Suitable for the dev / single-node Compose tier; OIDC SSO for production deployments lands in a later phase.

To change the password: stop the control plane, set HELMDECK_ADMIN_PASSWORD to the new value, and restart. There is no in-UI "change password" flow today — the password is managed out-of-band by whichever orchestrator runs the control plane (Compose, systemd, Kubernetes Secret, etc.).

If HELMDECK_ADMIN_PASSWORD is unset, the login endpoint returns 503 login_disabled. The control plane still runs and the API still works — operators can mint a JWT directly via the CLI:

./bin/control-plane -mint-token=alice -mint-token-scopes=admin -mint-token-ttl=12h

The minted token can be pasted into any tool that speaks Authorization: Bearer <token>.

Production note: the static-password path uses constant-time comparison so it's safe against timing attacks, but it's still a shared secret that has to be rotated by hand. For production deployments with multiple operators, OIDC SSO via your existing identity provider is the right answer — see the Phase 6 follow-up roadmap.

Architecture at a glance

• Sidecar pattern — browser runs in its own container, never embedded in the agent (ADR 001)
• Golang control plane — single static binary, distroless image, embeds the React UI (ADR 002)
• Capability Packs — the primary product surface; user-authorable via Go or WASM (ADRs 003, 012, 024)
• OpenAI-compatible AI gateway — Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, Ollama, Deepseek with encrypted keys + fallback routing (ADR 005)
• MCP server registry — stdio/SSE/WebSocket transports; built-in MCP server auto-derived from the pack catalog (ADR 006)
• Credential vault — AES-256-GCM with placeholder-token injection; agents never see secrets (ADR 007)
• Dual-tier deployment — Docker Compose for dev/single-node, Helm chart for Kubernetes production (ADRs 009, 010, 011)
• First-class MCP clients — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, OpenClaw, Gemini CLI via a single shared helmdeck-mcp bridge binary (ADRs 025, 030)
• Bundled object store — Garage ships in the Compose stack as the default artifact backend; pluggable to any S3-compatible endpoint (AWS S3, R2, B2, SeaweedFS) for production (ADR 031)

Built-in Capability Packs

57 packs ship in the box (47 without an AI gateway configured). Each one hides a multi-step workflow behind a single typed JSON-Schema call so weak open-weight models can drive it as reliably as frontier models. The full input/output contract for every pack lives in docs/PACKS.md. The highlights:

See ADRs 014–036 for per-pack contracts and docs/SIDECAR-LANGUAGES.md for the runbook on adding new language sidecars (Rust, Go, Ruby, etc.). The contribution guide in CONTRIBUTING.md walks through writing your own pack — the most useful contributions right now are SaaS API wrappers (Slack, Linear, Stripe, Notion, etc.).

License

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See NOTICE for attribution to bundled and depended-upon projects, and CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution guide and the SPDX header convention.

By submitting a pull request you agree to license your contribution under the same terms (Apache 2.0 Section 5 covers the contribution grant — there's no separate CLA).

Author

Tosin Akinosho (@tosin2013)