A voice-driven code explorer that lives in your terminal. Ask your codebase anything, watch it think aloud, and listen as it answers back.
$ bun install -g @andypai/orb COPY“Orb is an instrument panel for your codebase — not a chatbot, not an editor. A place to ask a question, see the search happen, and hear the answer while it’s still being drawn.
Orb is a Bun-native terminal application that pairs any real codebase with a model of your choice — Claude, GPT, or whichever you’re signed in to.
Every file it reads, every grep, every shell command it runs is surfaced on the panel as it happens. There is nothing hidden behind the curtain.
And because the answer is often longer than you’d like to read, Orb will, if you wish, speak it — through a local speech gateway, or your operating system’s own voice.
A single loop, refined. Type a question in English, or paste a MacWhisper transcription. Watch the model open files and run searches. Hear the answer while it’s streaming, first syllable in under two hundred milliseconds.
Every read, grep, and shell command rises to the surface the instant it happens. Nothing runs behind a curtain.
Kokoro via tts-gateway, or macOS say as a graceful fallback.
Either one, hands stay on the keyboard.
One session per project, resumed automatically. Close the tab and come back tomorrow — the thread is still there.
Shift+Tab rotates Claude models mid-conversation. Haiku for speed, Opus when the question gets interesting.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ ● orb — voice-driven code explorer CONNECTED │ └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ you › how does the streaming tts pipeline work? [ read ] src/tts/stream.ts ✓ [ read ] src/tts/gateway.ts ✓ [ grep ] "/tts/stream" — 4 matches ✓ [ bash ] curl http://localhost:8000/health ✓ orb › Orb opens a long-lived POST to /tts/stream on tts-gateway, forwards model deltas sentence-by-sentence, and pipes PCM audio into mpv as it arrives — first syllable lands in under 180 ms on local kokoro. · speaking now
Bun is required at runtime. Install globally, or run one-off with bunx when you’re only visiting.
$ bun install -g @andypai/orb
Reuse your Claude Code or Max session, or export an API key. Orb auto-selects in a sensible order.
$ export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-… $ # or, for OpenAI $ export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-…
Local macOS say works out of the box. For streaming Kokoro, install the gateway.
$ uv tool install tts-gateway[kokoro] $ tts serve --provider kokoro --port 8000
Launch Orb in the repository you want to understand. That is the entire ceremony.
$ orb $ # or somewhere else entirely $ orb /path/to/project
Reuses a local Claude Code or Max session when it finds one; otherwise falls back to ANTHROPIC_API_KEY. Rotate models live without restarting the conversation.
Runs through Orb’s own bash, readFile, and writeFile tools, backed by a local subprocess sandbox scoped to your project root.