What is Halo
Starting with a Question
In October 2025, Cursor revised its subscription policy and programming costs surged. During that period, we kept asking ourselves one question:
Is there a tool that combines the powerful Agent capabilities of Claude Code — remote desktop control from anywhere, an AI browser that autonomously completes tasks — with a friendly visual interface that includes file management and output preview, making it accessible to both developers and product managers?
We did our market research, and the conclusion was clear — no such tool existed. The market offered either chat tools with custom API support (like Open Web UI or LobeChat) or CLI-based, developer-centric terminals (like Claude Code CLI or Gemini CLI).
If what we wanted didn't exist, we'd build it ourselves.
Born Over a Weekend
We spent one weekend building a visual desktop for Claude Code — using Claude Code itself. The first version supported macOS, Windows, Linux, and Web simultaneously, with virtually no rough edges and approximately 95% of features working out of the box.
Even more remarkably: from that point on, 100% of Halo's code has been generated by AI. We have never opened Cursor or the official CLI again.
Three months later, Anthropic released something similar called Claude Cowork. Halo was among the first clients globally to bring the full Agent capabilities of Claude Code to an ordinary desktop.
What Halo Can Do
In one sentence: wrap 100% of Claude Code's Agent capabilities inside a visual interface that anyone can use.
Think of it this way: Windows turned DOS into a visual desktop; Halo turns the Claude Code CLI into a visual AI companion.
| Capability | Claude Code CLI | Halo |
|---|---|---|
| Full Agent capabilities | ✅ | ✅ |
| Visual interface | ❌ | ✅ |
| One-click installation | ❌ | ✅ |
| Remote access from any device | ❌ | ✅ |
| File preview & management | ❌ | ✅ |
| Built-in AI browser | ❌ | ✅ |
| Multiple channels / custom API keys | ❌ | ✅ |
| AI Digital Humans (24/7 background tasks) | ❌ | ✅ |
It's More Than Just a UI
Halo is functionally equivalent to Claude Code under the hood. Anything you can do from the command line, Halo can do through natural language — writing code, deploying servers, organizing your desktop, generating reports, controlling a browser… if an Agent can handle it, Halo supports it.
Starting with v2.0, Halo has further evolved into an AI Digital Human platform. You can delegate long-running tasks to digital humans and let them execute autonomously in the background 24/7, while you focus on more important things.
The Name
Halo is pronounced /ˈheɪləʊ/, and can also be remembered as Hello.
The word "halo" carries two meanings: it is the guardian daemon running on your local desktop, and it is the halo you can summon remotely at any time — no matter where you are, you are always in control.
Open Source & Philosophy
Halo is not a commercial product. It is an experiment driven by individuals and the community. We were born from a single phrase:
Kill Ugly Raw Source, AI Rewrites.
Once, this phrase meant using AI to refactor bad code. Today, its meaning has fully evolved — eliminating raw, inefficient, and repetitive human intervention in the digital world, and rewriting how tasks are executed with digital humans that run silently 24/7.
We believe the computing platform of the future should be a standardized Agent runtime, allowing AI agents to persistently and autonomously take over complex business workflows. This should be open source and community-built, not monopolized by commercial companies.
Get Involved
Contributions are welcome on GitHub. Feel free to open an Issue or submit a PR to help improve Halo.