Show HN: MandoCode Desktop – Native Windows AI Coding Assistant on Ollama .NET
github.comQuick backstory on how this version came to be: the original MandoCode is a CLI, and its UI is built with RazorConsole — Blazor components rendered into a terminal. Genuinely clever tech! I wanted tabs, though, and when I attended MS Build this year I got a good look at what WinUI apps could do and saw the potential to give the original agent some actual windows and tabs. Having up to 4 agents running in one window is pretty cool. Aside from that — tabs! I feel like everything is a chat these days, and for some reason my brain keeps screaming AGENTS, not chats, at me. I love the tabbed-browser experience a lot more
Some of the stuff I got to toy with once the plumbing worked:
- Context snapshots — closing an agent archives the conversation instead of deleting it, and you can snapshot mid-conversation to get an AI-written recap you can hand to a different model or a fresh agent and have it pick up the thread. You pick the LLM from a dropdown right when you create the snapshot.
- Transcript export — every agent tab can dump its full conversation to a file.
- 16 themes — this is where the kid in me just had plain fun, building the kind of themes you find in VS Code and other IDEs. Dracula, Tokyo Night, One Dark Pro, all the tasteful ones, plus a period-accurate Windows 98 desktop and a Cathode Ray CRT mode. Drop in your own background image too if none of the 16 land.
- A deliberately limited Notes pad — always there, separate from any project, optional AI help, but the assistant has zero file tools in it. The only way a reply lands in your note is you clicking a button to put it there.
- A tiny built-in music player — for the vibes, lol. Lofi/synthwave bundled, or point it at your own MP3 folder.
Overall I loved working within WinUI XD Besides the generated content, I wanna know how is really it like. Is it usable like hermes agent with gpt5.5 api on it?? this is to be used with open-weight models available on ollama (glm5.2, minimax-m3, qwen3.5) on the cloud and locally if you have the hardware. I haven't used Hermes yet, but it seems great. My approach for this was to create an application that allows you to quickly spin up an agent in a tab, review notes, context, and project folders to produce something. I believe Hermes is highlighted as an agent that keeps learning and building the more you use it, and it seems like many would say it was a level up from Clawdbot as a personal assistant. My line of thinking was let's make tabbed agents and then decorate features around those tab sessions to make my productivity higher and more organized. I find that agentic work and development is a mixture of agents and workflows outside of this project and I use all of them openai, anthropic , ollama etc..