Status & limits

A concise, user-facing view of what frites does today and where the rough edges are. For the full, dated enumeration of implementation status, see roadmap/current-status.md, which is canonical.

What works

Built and tested (126/126 unit tests plus live smoke against a real claude client):

• The gateway, both surfaces (/v1/messages for Claude Code and /v1/responses for Codex), with SSE streaming, live per-agent telemetry, live answer streaming, fan-out, synthesis, the LLM fan-out judge, fanOutScope first-turn scoping, background-model bypass, a per-turn council recap, and cost telemetry. See product/gateway-mode.md.

• Code editing through the gateway. On a coding turn the gateway emits the Read / Edit / Bash tool_use your host executes on the real files, verified end-to-end (a real claude client → gateway fixed a bug and the tests passed), with no API key.

• The background service (launchd on macOS), so the gateway runs always-on. See getting-started/service-management.md.

• MCP worktree mode. Worktrees → tests-as-oracle → optional cross-candidate synthesis → vetted diff → apply to a fresh branch. See product/mcp-worktree-mode.md.

• The config CLI. frites config init/show/get/set/unset/validate/path with global+repo layering. See reference/cli.md.

Known gaps

• Value gate pending. Whether fan-out quality actually beats a single agent on real tickets at acceptable cost has not yet been validated. This is the headline open question. If it fails, the thin slice is the product.

• Codex tool-call emission on /v1/responses pending. The gateway drives coding turns by emitting host-executed tool calls today on the Anthropic /v1/messages surface; emitting function_call on Codex's /v1/responses is not yet built. Codex works fully for Q&A / reasoning turns, but the inline code-editing loop is Claude-only for now.

Realistic limitations

• Slower than a single agent. A council of independent agents, cross-checked and synthesized, is the core bet: better output traded for latency and metered spend. Worktree mode is the far end of that curve (minutes, not seconds). See the tradeoff note in architecture/risks-and-tradeoffs.md.

• Metered, not free. Programmatic use draws the Agent-SDK credit / ChatGPT plan; see product/auth-and-billing.md. Spend scales with fan-out, bounded by fan-out policy and fan-out scope.

• Headless, high-trust posture. Children run unattended without interactive approvals, and several hardening items are still open (no strong sandbox, no secret deny-read). Review the safety model before pointing frites at a repository.

For the complete, dated status list, see roadmap/current-status.md.