Glossary
what is a control plane?
TL;DR
A control plane is the part of a system that manages the work rather than doing it. For coding agents, it's the layer that starts agents, tracks their state, routes your input to them and shows you the results, while the agents themselves do the coding. It can run on your machine, like Paseo's daemon, or as a hosted service, like Clor's. Pane works as a local control plane: its app and runpane CLI start and steer agents on your machine.
The term comes from networking, where the control plane decides where traffic goes and the data plane actually moves it. Agent tools borrowed it for the same split: one layer decides and coordinates, the agents do the work.
What a control plane does
Start, track, route and show. It manages agents but isn't one.
In agent tools, the control plane keeps a list of running agents and their state, starts and stops them, sends your messages to the right one, and gives every client, from a desktop app to a phone, the same view of what's happening. It doesn't supply the model or write the code.
Local or hosted
Where the control plane runs decides who can see your agents and what happens when you're offline.
Paseo calls itself a control plane: one background daemon that its desktop, phone, web and terminal clients all talk to, running on your own machine. super.engineering calls its Mac app an "agent control plane". Clor runs a hosted control plane that coordinates agents in Docker containers on your machine or on cloud machines it rents you. HumanLayer describes itself as a "multiplayer control plane" for teams.
| Where it runs | Trade-off |
|---|---|
| On your machine | Your code and agents stay local and work offline; reaching it from a phone needs a tunnel or pairing. |
| Hosted by the vendor | Easy to reach from anywhere and share with a team; you depend on their service and account. |
Pane as a control plane
Pane's app, CLI and MCP server are three doors into the same local control plane.
Pane runs locally. The desktop app, the runpane CLI and Pane's MCP server all control the same workspace: creating panes, starting agents, reading their output and sending them input. With Remote Pane, a daemon on one machine keeps that control plane running while you connect from a laptop or phone.
Related
Sources
- Corrections
- If anything here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll fix it and update the date at the top. Open an issue on GitHub
- Sources
frequently asked questions
By Parsa Khazaeepoul, co-founder of Pane. .