Agents that work on your computer. A roster you message like people, with a built-in signed-in browser, on the subscriptions you already pay for.
Pollen is a Grok Bot competitor that runs on your own computer — the roster of named agents you message like people, with Codex's built-in browser and its quiet, text-first chat. Free and open source.
It is not a chat app with AI bolted on, and it is not an AI Slack. Every agent speaks the Agent Client Protocol over a subscription you already hold, works in a copy of your folder, so your originals are untouched until you push, and shares one browser you sign into once.
Agents sit down the left edge the way people do: a face, a name, one line about what they do, one dot for how they are. Every face is drawn from small circles and derived from the agent's own id — eleven species, six moods, its own blink rhythm. Click one and it boops.
You do not fill in a form to get an agent. Pollen offers to build one and interviews you, one question at a time, then writes the agent to disk. It appears in the roster within a second.
There is no integrations page, because there are no integrations. The browser is a real Chromium view inside the window, on a cookie partition that persists — you sign into Gmail, or Photos, or your bank's dashboard, once, and every agent in the workspace can reach it from then on.
No agent in Pollen is allowed to say it lacks a connector for something. It opens the real URL, checks whether it is signed in, asks you once if it is not, and carries on. That rule lives in the preamble every agent inherits.
Agents drive it through tools — navigate, snapshot, click, type, screenshot — and you watch it happen in the panel. Split is the default: the page opens beside the conversation, never on top of it.
You point Pollen at a folder and it makes its own copy, respecting your ignore rules. Everything the agents do happens there. Nothing reaches your originals until you open the diff, tick the files you want, and push.
Every agent runs a CLI you already have, authenticated the way that CLI authenticates — its own login, its own account, its own quota. Pollen never asks for an API key unless you turn key mode on yourself.
Pollen detects what is installed on first run and offers to install or log in the ones that are not. Pick a provider and a model per agent; the model name sits in the chat header, because being silently on the wrong model costs you a whole session.
A document or a design does not open in a window you have to manage. It replaces the conversation in the same column, with the same bar underneath — now aimed at the page. Nothing pops up. Nothing minimises. Back to chat is one click, in the header where it always is.
The browser stopped being a panel and became the connector. It is a real Chromium view on a persistent cookie partition, which means a sign-in survives a restart and belongs to the workspace rather than to one conversation.
Split is now the default geometry for every surface. A page opens beside the conversation at roughly half the width, with a hairline between them and the bar still under the chat. Full screen is the exception, reserved for heavy artifacts, and it docks the transcript to the bottom rather than hiding it
Pollen spends its entire colour budget on one thing per view, so that thing means something. A tool call is one line, not a card you expand. Separation comes from a hairline or a change of surface, never from a drawn box. Nothing on screen is set bold.
Press the microphone and the bar itself becomes the recorder — no modal, no new screen. The engine is Whisper running locally through a hidden window that is the only thing in the app allowed to touch your microphone. Nothing is uploaded.
It works in a sandboxed copy. Your originals stay untouched until you push.
macOS and Linux are not packaged yet. The app builds and runs on both from source, which is also how you run it if you would rather read the code first.