Mention it in Slack and an agent reviews the PR, ships the fix, or answers the question — on the model you choose, with its tools running where you decide.
Node 24 and an Anthropic API key; no Slack.
npx @coreplane/switchboard init --organization <your GitHub org> --anthropic-key <your key>
npx @coreplane/switchboard ask "what can you do?"init writes .env (mode 600) and config/config.yaml into ~/.switchboard, so every command works from any directory; ask runs the whole pipeline. curl -fsSL https://openswitchboard.dev/install.sh | sh is the same init.
Next: Get started.
Four seams: Channel, Provider, Executor, Agent. Each is an interface with more than one implementation. The dispatcher sits between them: it reads what you asked for and picks the agent, resolves the model through the config layers, checks authorization and runs the agent loop (How a request flows).
flowchart LR
subgraph channel ["Channel — how a request arrives"]
C1["Slack"]
C2["CLI"]
C3["HTTP · MCP"]
end
D{"Dispatcher<br/>routing · config layers · authorization"}
subgraph agent ["Agent — what runs"]
AG["general · coding · review · ship · research · explore · conductor"]
end
subgraph provider ["Provider — the model"]
P["Anthropic · OpenAI-compatible"]
end
subgraph executor ["Executor — where tools run"]
E["local · sandbox · resident"]
end
C1 & C2 & C3 -->|"message"| D
D -->|"runs"| AG
AG <-->|"complete"| P
AG <-->|"bash · read · write"| E
| You need | What it unlocks | |
|---|---|---|
| Required | A model provider key: Anthropic, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint | Every agent |
| For Slack | A Slack app (Socket Mode: bot token + app-level token) | The bot in your workspace |
| Optional | A GitHub App, or a repo-scoped token | Repository reads; pull requests |
| Optional | A Cloudflare account | Production: the bot plus the state, resident and sandbox Workers |
| Optional | An E2B account | Per-thread micro-VMs without Cloudflare |
| Optional | A Brave Search key (BRAVE_SEARCH_API_KEY) |
Web search for the research agent |
Off means the bot never offers it and the dashboard and the plan never show it (Turn features on and off). The bot is npx @coreplane/switchboard start on any machine with Node, or the published image ghcr.io/coreplanelabs/switchboard.
Docs: https://openswitchboard.dev (docs/) · CONTRIBUTING.md · AGENTS.md · SECURITY.md · Apache-2.0.
Going deeper: commands and directives exist for whoever wants to type them (Slack commands); a plain sentence needs none.