OpenHelm: A Local Background Scheduler for Claude Code with Self-Correcting Retry Logic

OpenHelm is a background scheduler specifically designed for Claude Code that addresses the problem of tasks stalling or failing repeatedly without user intervention. It runs jobs on a schedule with automatic retry logic that analyzes failures and adjusts prompts before retrying.

How It Works

Users set goals like "keep tests green," "weekly codebase audit," or "draft outreach for new leads." OpenHelm builds a plan of one-off and recurring jobs based on these goals. When a job fails, a lightweight assessor run reads the failure context and adjusts the prompt before retrying. Jobs continue running on schedule without requiring terminal monitoring.

Local-First Architecture

All application state remains on your machine: SQLite database at ~/.openhelm/openhelm.db, credentials stored in macOS Keychain (no SaaS dashboard). LLM calls go through your existing Claude Code subscription rather than requiring a separate API key. While it uses cloud LLMs (Claude), the infrastructure is fully local, keeping job history and project context on-device rather than in cloud databases.

Technical Stack

• Tauri 2 (Rust shell)
• React frontend
• Node.js agent sidecar
• SQLite via Drizzle ORM

The system has three fault-isolated subsystems:

• Scheduler (1-minute tick)
• Executor (streams logs to database as they arrive)
• Watchdog (30-minute timeout, auto-SIGTERM on hung processes)

Availability

The project is fair-source on GitHub and free for teams under 4 users.