From the Lab

Tools we built for ourselves.

Frameworks, runtimes, and developer tooling that came out of real client work. When the same scaffolding showed up in three engagements, we hardened it, named it, and shipped it.

Self-hosted agent runtime

OpenAstra

openastra.net

Production-grade infrastructure for agentic systems. Memory tiering, multi-channel routing, tool execution, swarm coordination, the scaffolding most agent frameworks treat as an afterthought. Engineered for serious deployments, not demo notebooks. Runs on Node 20+.

Node 20+Self-hostedOpen SourceAgent runtime
Modern HTTP framework

Ingenium

ingenium.contracollective.com

A modern HTTP framework that keeps the Express mental model and ecosystem but fixes what doesn't scale. Handlers return values, body parsing is lazy, middleware still works the way you remember. Drop it into an existing Express app as a router and migrate one path at a time.

Node.jsTypeScriptExpress-shapedIncremental migration
Desktop app for AI-native dev

RiftPanel

riftpanel.com

A desktop workspace built for the way teams actually work with AI coding agents. Multi-agent terminal management, persistent sessions that survive restarts, layouts that stick, output that does not scroll into oblivion when a 40-step Claude Code task is running.

DesktopDeveloper toolingAI workflows
Open on GitHub

Source, issues, and smaller experiments.

Most of what we ship here is open source. File an issue, fork it, send a PR.

github.com/Contra-Collective

Need something we haven't built yet?

Most of these started as a one-off solution to a client problem. Tell us yours and we'll see what should be built.

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