Workspaces

The workspace

Manifold opens straight into a full developer workspace, a panelled layout you can rearrange. The panel set includes a repositories sidebar, the agent terminal, search, a file tree, modified files, shell tabs, a web preview, and one or more editor panes.

Key workflows:

• Open an existing local repository or clone one from GitHub.
• Start an agent on a fresh worktree branch (named <repo>/<task-slug>, e.g. manifold/fix-login-bug).
• Start an agent directly on the current branch when you don’t want a worktree.
• Continue work from an existing branch or an open pull request.
• Resume a stopped agent in place.
• Generate commit messages and pull request descriptions with the same runtime the session used.
• Detect merge conflicts and see how far ahead or behind the base branch you are.

Launching an agent

An agent can start in four ways:

Start on	What it does
New branch	The default. Creates a dedicated git worktree.
Current branch	Runs in the project checkout, with no separate worktree.
Existing branch	Continues work already in progress.
Open pull request	Checks out the branch of a pull request and continues from there.

Each agent shows one of four states: running when it’s working, waiting when it needs input from you, done when it finished, and error when it stopped on a failure.

Working across multiple repositories

A Workspace groups several repositories into one working set so a single agent can operate across all of them at once.

Workspaces are opt-in. Turn on Settings → General → Enable Workspaces first, which adds working-set cards to the left sidebar. With it off, Manifold keeps the standard repository-only workflow and the action below won’t be there.

• Create one from the New Workspace action in the sidebar, then pick the repositories and the runtime to include.
• The first repository is the agent’s working directory; the others are mounted through the runtime’s own multi-directory flag (--add-dir for Claude, Codex, and Copilot; --include-directories for Gemini).
• When the agent starts, Manifold creates a worktree for every git repository in the set, all on the same branch (manifold/<workspace-name> by default), and removes them when the session ends.
• Add or remove repositories from a workspace at any time from its sidebar section.

Workspaces are useful when a task spans several repositories at once. One example is landing a change that touches both a backend and a frontend repo. Another is running the same refactor across many services.