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Building a Desktop Control Center for OpenClaw with Tauri and Rust

#agents #openclaw #rust #showdev

I've been working with OpenClaw for managing AI agents, and I kept running into the same problems: juggling multiple instances for different environments, manually editing openclaw.json, and lacking visibility into token usage and costs.

So I built Pond — a desktop app that sits on top of OpenClaw and solves these issues.

Screenshots (from the repo README)

Analytics dashboard

Role management

Team tasks

Agent chat

What it does

Pond is a control center that lets you:

  • Manage multiple OpenClaw instances on one machine (like dev/test/prod environments)
  • Orchestrate team collaboration with a built-in task state machine (open → claimed → done/failed)
  • Monitor in real-time — tokens, costs, sessions, system resources
  • Edit configs visually instead of wrestling with JSON files

Each instance runs independently with its own Gateway process, port, config, and team data.

Technical stack

I chose Tauri 2 instead of Electron because I wanted native performance and smaller binaries. The backend is Rust:

  • tokio::process for managing Gateway subprocesses
  • fs4 for cross-platform file locks (team data concurrency)
  • Native WebSocket plugin for bidirectional streaming with OpenClaw

The frontend is React 19 + TypeScript + Zustand for state, with Radix UI components and TailwindCSS.

The team collaboration layer

One unique feature is the collaboration workflow. You define roles in agents.list (a Leader and executors), and Pond manages a task lifecycle:

  1. Leader creates tasks (state: open)
  2. Executors claim tasks (state: claimed)
  3. Executors mark them done or failed with reasons
  4. Real-time notifications pushed via WebSocket to relevant roles

There's a built-in pond-team skill that orchestrates this entire workflow without manual coordination.

What's missing

It's still early (v1.0.4), and there are gaps:

  • No cloud sync for configs yet
  • No mobile clients (only desktop)
  • Skill marketplace is planned but not built

But the core features work, and it's fully open source.

Try it

Installers for macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Windows, and Linux are on the GitHub releases page:

👉 https://github.com/tageecc/pond

If you're building with OpenClaw, I'd appreciate feedback — especially around what metrics or workflows you need most.

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