~*~ Open source · MIT or Apache-2.0 ~*~
About Ballast
Ballast is a small local daemon for machines that run many coding agents at once: builds, tests and dev servers in parallel.
It knows which processes belong to which agent. When memory or CPU runs out, it slows or pauses agent work and leaves the rest of your machine alone.
$ ballast top
Ballast Critical · 2 frozen · 1 held
MEM [||||||||||||··] 13.9 GiB / 16.0 GiB
Frozen claude cargo test 8s
Frozen codex next build 3s
Held claude npm run e2e 8s
What it does
- Holds an agent's next heavy command while memory is tight.
- Pauses agent builds when memory runs out. Never kills them.
- Backgrounds agent builds while the CPU is saturated (macOS).
- Fails open. If Ballast stops, your agents keep working.
Install
$ brew install anur4ag/tap/ballast
$ ballast install
Shows every file it will change and backs it up before asking.
Works with Claude Code and Codex on macOS 11+ and Linux.
- [Debian and Ubuntu](https://github.com/anur4ag/ballast#install)
Privacy
No telemetry, no account, no cloud. Data stays in ~/.ballast.
Source
- [GitHub](https://github.com/anur4ag/ballast)
- [Docs](https://github.com/anur4ag/ballast/tree/main/docs)
- [Releases](https://github.com/anur4ag/ballast/releases)