Overview
HumanLayer is a coding agent workspace built for teams. The idea is to pull agent sessions, research and design documents and code changes into one interface for collaboration, instead of everyone running agents in their own terminal. It supports bring-your-own-key or existing subscriptions for Claude Code, Codex, Copilot and others. A local daemon runs several sessions in parallel on a laptop, while cloud daemons take long-running work that continues after the laptop closes. The team behind it wrote 12 Factor Agents and much of the context engineering practice in circulation, and the RPI (research, plan, implement) framework is open source. The product is SOC 2 Type II compliant.
Key Features
- Task workspaces: Groups sessions, artifacts and worktrees by task so the whole team works in one place
- Bring your own key: Plug in existing Claude Code, Codex or Copilot subscriptions and API keys with no separate token bill
- Local and cloud in parallel: A local daemon runs many sessions at once while cloud daemons take long tasks that keep running after you close the laptop
- Documents feed back to agents: Research, design and plan documents, plus comments on them, flow directly back to the agents
- Available everywhere: Consistent interface on web, desktop and phone for checking in and taking over sessions
Use Cases
- Large codebase refactors done by several people at once
- Agent development flows where humans review the design
- Running several background coding tasks in parallel
- Turning research-to-implementation into reusable artifacts
- Standardizing how a team works with coding agents
Pros
- Complete collaboration surface: sessions, documents and diffs in one place
- Bring your own key: no separate token bill
- Runs locally and in the cloud so long tasks do not occupy your machine
- Workflows come from established context engineering practice
- SOC 2 Type II, which helps enterprise conversations
Pricing
Starter is free for teams of three or fewer. Pro costs $100 per user per month and includes unlimited tasks and sessions, multi-repo workspaces and worktrees, real-time collaboration and remote daemons. Enterprise adds SSO, audit logs and volume pricing.
Summary
HumanLayer targets a team using coding agents together rather than one person going faster. Its value sits at the collaboration layer: sessions, documents and code changes live together, comments flow back to the agents, and local plus cloud daemons keep long tasks running. Bring-your-own-key billing suits teams that already hold subscriptions. Small teams can start on Starter and move to Pro when they need multi-repo workspaces and remote runtimes.
Version History
- New release adds /hl:teleport and /hl:orchestrate (2026-10-10): HumanLayer shipped a new release with /hl:teleport, which moves a local session to any remote host without losing context, and /hl:orchestrate, which drives HumanLayer with HumanLayer to split tasks, fork workflows and move artifacts, alongside a cleaner rounded interface. The community also demonstrated a serverless background agent built on Cloudflare Durable Objects that opens pull requests from GitHub issues, released as open source.