Launch HN: Rowboat (YC S24) – Open-source IDE for multi-agent systems (github.com)

Rowboat (YC S24) is an open-source IDE for rapidly building, testing, and deploying multi-agent AI systems. It provides a natural-language “copilot” to assemble agents, one-click tool integrations, native RAG (file uploads + URL scraping), and triggers/actions to automate workflows. You can run it locally via Docker (clone the repo, set OPENAI_API_KEY, ./start.sh, then open localhost:3000) or use their hosted cloud; agents are deployable via API or SDK. Example demos include meeting-prep workflows, customer-support assistants connected to an MCP server, and personal assistants. For the AI/ML community this lowers the friction to prototype and ship agentic applications: Rowboat bundles orchestration, tool connectivity, and retrieval-augmented grounding in a single, extensible interface. It supports custom LLM providers (including aggregators like OpenRouter and LiteLLM), making it easy to swap models or run self-hosted backends. Technically, Rowboat’s combination of native RAG, modular tool integrations, trigger-based automation, and multi-provider LLM support signals a push toward reproducible, production-ready agent stacks that can be run locally or in the cloud—useful for researchers and engineers experimenting with agentic behaviors and real-world workflows.