Opinions

Nocturnal is an opinionated tool. It is built around a specific way of working, and it leans into those opinions rather than trying to be everything to everyone. This page explains the reasoning so you know what you are getting.

We build for ourselves first

Nocturnal started as the tool we wanted for our own work. That means the decisions reflect real workflows we use every day, not a survey of what the widest audience might prefer. The result is sharper in some directions and narrower in others than a general-purpose platform would be.

If a choice does not suit you, we would genuinely like to hear about it — your feedback helps us decide whether an opinion is load-bearing or just habit. But we will not remove an opinion solely to broaden the market.

Git is the only version control

Nocturnal reads branches, diffs, commits, and pull requests. It talks to GitHub. It does not abstract over version control or support other systems. If your project uses something other than Git, the source-control features will not work for you.

Agents run synchronously

When you queue agent tasks, Nocturnal runs them one at a time within a project. The design favours batching work — line up everything you need, walk away for a few hours or a few days, and come back to a set of reviewed results. It is not optimised for running many agents in parallel and watching them race to finish.

Ports and processes stay running

Nocturnal keeps your development servers alive across sessions. Each project declares its ports, the engine detects conflicts, and processes stay up until you stop them. This is intentional — we want projects to stay reachable on your computer without restarting everything each morning.

Fewer options, stronger defaults

Where other tools expose a setting, Nocturnal often picks a default and moves on. Fixed ports, a single engine per machine, one agent queue per project. The trade-off is less flexibility for less configuration.

Feedback is welcome

We are not closed to other ways of thinking. If an opinion gets in your way, open an issue or use the feedback button in the app. We read everything. Some opinions will change; others are the reason the tool exists. Either way, we would rather hear about it than have you work around it quietly.