Your AI team clocks in while you watch

A train with no conductor

In Japan there's a kind of local train called a wanman, a "one-man" train. There's a driver, but no conductor walking the aisles. It just runs.

That's the image behind wanman, a free tool from chekusu, a small company in Japan founded by Guo Yu, an engineer who used to work at ByteDance. It lets you run a whole little team of AI agents (Claude Code or Codex) on your own computer. One of them acts as a supervisor, keeping the others coordinated, while they pick up tasks and hand back finished work.

Your role changes. You stop being the person typing every instruction and become the person watching the train go by, stepping in only when something needs you.

Why it caught my eye

Most of us use AI one conversation at a time. wanman hints at something different: several assistants quietly working together, with someone keeping them in line. It runs on your own machine, so your work stays with you. And it's open source, so anyone can look inside or build on it. People seem to agree it's worth a look: it's the company's most popular project, and it keeps growing.

Words worth knowing

• Agent: an AI that doesn't just answer, but actually does tasks step by step.
• Supervisor: the agent that coordinates the others, like a shift manager.
• Open source (Apache-2.0): the recipe is public and free to use, even commercially.

Something to think about

Picture your week. Which tasks would you happily hand to a small crew, as long as you could watch from the platform?