Getting Started — Introduction

Introduction

What Switchyard is, how it works, and why it exists.

Switchyard is a multi-agent coding orchestration platform. It decomposes complex development tasks across specialized AI agents, orchestrates their work through a structured pipeline, and gives you human review before anything merges.

Your source code never leaves your infrastructure.

How it works

  1. You describe what you want built — in natural language, through the dashboard’s Yardmaster chat
  2. Switchyard decomposes the task — into discrete subtasks with dependencies, file scopes, and test requirements
  3. Specialized agents execute in parallel — coders implement, testers write tests, reviewers check quality, security analysts audit for vulnerabilities
  4. You review and merge — through a structured pipeline with full diff visibility, execution traces, and context-aware review actions

Architecture

Switchyard has two components:

Control Plane

Hosted at app.switchyard.cloud. Manages task orchestration, pipeline state, analytics, team management, and the dashboard. Sees only metadata — task status, step counts, token usage, costs. Never source code or file contents.

Relay

Runs on your infrastructure as a Docker container. Manages git repositories, spawns agent containers on isolated git worktrees, stores execution traces in local SQLite, and keeps API keys encrypted with AES-256-GCM.

The relay connects to the control plane via secure WebSocket to receive commands and report metadata. Code, keys, and traces never leave your servers.

Next steps

Next Installation →