NIGHTSHIFT

A pixel office where cheap models work the night shift and you are the boss.

Every desk on the floor is an agent backed by a real model served through an OmniRoute gateway. Give an order and the boss avatar physically walks to that desk, says the prompt in a speech bubble, and the worker starts typing. The monitor scrolls at the speed of the token stream — what you are watching is the actual response coming in. Finished work flies into the IN tray and waits for you to approve it or throw it back.

It is a real tool wearing a costume: a local model gateway, a job queue, batching, pipelines, and an A/B arena — with a window you can leave open on a second monitor and actually enjoy looking at.

Claude Code drives the same floor over HTTP, so the heavy thinking happens in Claude while the small, boring, repetitive work gets pushed down to free models.

  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │  Claude Code (orchestrator)  ── POST /api/orders ──┐         │
  │  You (the window)            ── click a desk ──────┤         │
  └────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────┘
                                                       ▼
                                        NIGHTSHIFT floor server :20200
                                                       │
                                          OpenAI-compatible /v1
                                                       ▼
                                             OmniRoute :20128
                                     290+ providers · 500+ models · 90+ free

---

Requirements

Node	22.6 or newer. The server runs as TypeScript, straight from source.
OS	Linux, macOS, Windows. Nothing platform-specific, no launcher scripts.
A gateway	Optional to start, required to reach a model. Anything OpenAI-compatible at a /v1 base URL works; OmniRoute is what it is built and tested against.
Provider keys	None needed to try it. A bare OmniRoute serves ~115 models with no credentials at all.
Network at runtime	None. The pixel font is embedded and every sprite is drawn in code, so the window renders with the cable unplugged.

Run it

npx @kaandrick/nightshift

That is the whole thing — it builds the window on first run, tells you whether it found a gateway, serves on http://localhost:20200 and opens it. Ctrl+C closes the floor.

The npm name is scoped because the registry blocks the bare nightshift as too close to an unrelated package called night-shift. npm i nightshift will simply find nothing — the scope is the only published coordinate. The command it installs is still nightshift.

Or from source, which is what you want if you intend to change anything:

git clone https://github.com/kaanisthatyou/nightshift
cd nightshift
npm install
npm start

Either way the same flags apply:

npm start -- --port 8080          # somewhere else
npm start -- --no-open            # don't touch the browser
npm start -- --gateway http://box.local:20128/v1

Working on it instead of using it:

npm run dev          # floor :20200 + vite :5180 with HMR, open http://localhost:5180

Plug in a gateway

npm install -g omniroute
omniroute            # dashboard + gateway on http://localhost:20128

Then in NIGHTSHIFT open the gateway tab, paste http://localhost:20128/v1 and — only if your instance requires one — the API key from its dashboard → Endpoints. Hit connect and the model board fills up.

Environment variables work too (see .env.example):

OMNIROUTE_URL=http://localhost:20128/v1 OMNIROUTE_KEY=sk-... npm start

Have a pile of provider keys to load into OmniRoute? cp keys.example.txt ~/.omniroute/keys.txt, fill it in, then npm run keys (npm run keys -- --dry-run first if you want to see the parse without sending anything). NIGHTSHIFT never stores a provider key itself — it only ever talks to the gateway.

---

The floor

thing	what it means
desk	one agent, one model, one seat (8 desks max)
name / cyan label	who they are and which model is sitting there
monitor scroll speed	live token stream from that model
speech bubble	boss orders and worker replies, as they happen
morale bar	up when you approve, down when you reject or it fails
IN tray	finished work waiting for review
payroll	real cost, computed from the gateway's pricing
neon sign	pink = gateway up, red flicker = gateway down

Click a desk to select it, / focuses the order bar, Esc closes a task. Three desks are already staffed on first boot so there is something to give an order to.

Two rules the product will not break

Unpriced is not free. A gateway only reports pricing for providers it has credentials for. Models it gives no price for are tagged no price, never free — unknown is not the same as free. Only a known price, or a real per-response cost header, moves the payroll figure.

Nothing is invented behind your back. Some catalog entries are listed but answer 401 not supported. When that happens the desk does not silently die and does not silently swap either: the task is retried once on the gateway's own auto router and the result is stamped fell back from <model> in the board and in the task detail, so you always know who actually did the work.

And with no gateway reachable at all, the floor still runs — but every output is marked GHOST OUTPUT and tagged ghost in the API. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is made up. Turn it off in gateway → house rules.

Batches, pipelines, arena

Three ways to move volume, all in the board tab and all on the API:

• Batch — one template, a list of items, split across whichever desks are free, with retries landing on a different desk than the one that failed.
• Pipeline — steps that feed each other. {{input}} is replaced with the previous step's output. Draft on a free model, polish on a better one, translate on a third.
• Arena — the same prompt to several desks at once, side by side, and you pick the winner. It is recorded on that desk. Stop guessing which free model is better.

Claude Code as the boss

The whole floor is drivable over HTTP:

# give an order and wait for the answer (this is the one you want)
curl -s localhost:20200/api/orders -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"text":"rewrite these 20 commit messages in imperative mood: ...","wait":true}'

# fire and forget, then read it back later
curl -s localhost:20200/api/orders -H 'content-type: application/json' -d '{"text":"...","wait":false}'
curl -s localhost:20200/api/tasks/<id>

A Claude Code skill ships in nightshift-skill/ — the playbook for when to delegate, how to fan work out across desks, how to run an arena, and how to report back honestly about which model did what:

cp -r nightshift-skill ~/.claude/skills/nightshift        # macOS / Linux

Copy-Item -Recurse nightshift-skill $HOME\.claude\skills\nightshift   # Windows

Then just say "nightshift these" and hand over a batch.

API

method	path	what it does
GET	/api/state	full snapshot: workers, tasks, jobs, ledger, gateway
GET	/api/models?refresh=1	model board with free/price flags
POST	/api/gateway	{baseUrl, apiKey} — reconnect
POST	/api/workers	{model, name?, title?} — hire
PATCH	/api/workers/:id	{model?, name?, state?} — reassign a desk
DELETE	/api/workers/:id	fire
POST	/api/orders	{text, workerId?, model?, wait?, waitMs?} — the boss walks over
POST	/api/tasks	same but without the theatre defaults
GET	/api/tasks/:id	one task with output, tokens, cost, latency, routing decision
POST	/api/tasks/:id/approve	morale up, task closed
POST	/api/tasks/:id/reject	{note} — sends it back with your note attached
POST	/api/tasks/:id/retry	run it again
POST	/api/jobs	{title, steps:[{title, prompt}]} — pipeline
POST	/api/batch	{title, template, items[], retries} — one list split across desks
POST	/api/arena	{text, workerIds?} — same prompt to several desks
POST	/api/arena/:id/winner	{taskId} — your call, recorded on that desk
POST	/api/office	{kind} — make something happen (pizza, gossip, cat, printer, flicker, sleepy)
POST	/api/boss/say	{text, workerId?} — talk to the room
WS	/ws	every event, live

---

Layout

bin/nightshift.mjs  the one command: build check, gateway probe, serve, open
server/             floor server: gateway client, scheduler, REST, websocket
  omniroute.ts        streaming OpenAI-compatible client + model/pricing normalising
  engine.ts           who works on what, retries, pipelines, the theatre timing
  store.ts            state + json persistence (data/floor.json)
  routes.ts           the API above
web/src/            the window
  pixel/art.ts        every object on the floor as a char grid, DOM-free on purpose
  pixel/sprites.ts    bakes art.ts to canvases, plus the people
  pixel/scene.ts      the 360x240 renderer: rain, lighting, walking, bubbles
  components/         roster, board, wire, gateway panels
tools/              art review and key import
shared/             types both sides agree on

Drawing the pixel art

art.ts holds no DOM calls, which lets the art be rendered and looked at without a browser. Two tools do that:

npm run art          # every asset on a contact sheet + a room mock, into .art/
npm run shots        # the REAL FloorScene, headless, into docs/

npm run art fails loudly on the three things that go wrong when you draw with strings: a row of the wrong length, a character with no palette entry, and an asset that nothing in scene.ts ever draws. Both run in CI — the images in this README are generated by npm run shots, not screenshotted by hand.

More in CONTRIBUTING.md, including the desk geometry contract every prop depends on.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

One exception: the Silkscreen typeface is embedded as base64 so the floor works offline. It is copyright The Silkscreen Project Authors under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and is not covered by the MIT license — details in NOTICE.md.