The direction is human
More time for the work that matters.¶
Product teams spend too much attention keeping tools and people in sync. Heinzelmännchen aims to make the repeatable parts of that work something small helpers can draft, organize and prepare, with people deciding what goes out into the world.
The name comes from the helpers of Cologne: little people who finished the town's work at night. Our ambition is practical rather than magical: make the work explicit, connect the right tools, show what happened, and ask for a person where a person's judgment belongs.
The foundation is available¶
Today's Heinzel supplies a kernel and typed operations; CLI, MCP, REST and web heads; configuration and health checks; workflow and team foundations; and plugins with independent build, test and release cycles. The standard app includes everyday utilities and a theme. Optional connectors and source examples broaden the surface.
Install the foundation · Explore what is available
The direction we are building toward¶
An open-source AI operating system for product teams: helpers that maintain context, prepare updates, draft agendas and reports, and make repeatable team workflows easier to inspect and approve. Rich end-to-end team automation is still evolving. A connector's presence in the catalog does not mean every envisioned workflow is production ready.
Principles that shape the design¶
| Principle | What it means in the software |
|---|---|
| People stay in control | Approval and visible states are part of the work, not an afterthought. |
| Local by default | A local workspace is the starting point; remote access is an explicit choice. |
| Model and agent agnostic | Typed operations and MCP let different tools use the same capabilities. |
| Open and composable | Public contracts, independent plugins, ordinary Python dependencies and an MIT license. |
| Useful to the whole team | Team context and workflow design matter alongside code. |
| Small enough to improve quickly | Test core without providers; test a plugin without all of core. |
The authoritative intent and longer reasoning live in INTENT.md. The architecture tour shows how these principles become boundaries, and the ADRs record the decisions we can revisit with evidence.
Help shape it¶
Build a useful plugin, design a theme, improve a workflow, document a confusing step, or report a reproducible problem. Start with a change that has a clear outcome and a short feedback loop.