Saying 'Hi' to This Agent Daemon Cost $0.29 - A Rival's Hands-On Paseo Review

Disclosure

Disclosure up front: I build agentproto, which overlaps with Paseo in the "daemon that runs coding agents" space. Everything below is the verbatim session log from installing and exercising Paseo v0.1.107 on macOS (Node 22) on 2026-07-13 - commands, outputs, and costs are real. Where Paseo is better, I say so plainly. Corrections welcome - file an issue and I'll amend.

Almost every agent-tool review you read this year was written from the README. You can tell: the features arrive in the order the docs list them, and nobody ever mentions the bill. This one was written from the terminal. I installed Paseo, ran real agents through it, made one hit its permission wall on purpose, and read the invoice.

The first thing it told me: saying "hi" costs twenty-nine cents. And here's the part that should make you trust the rest - I build a Paseo competitor. A rival's praise is the only kind a README can't buy.

The one idea, if you remember nothing else: A README is the tool's sales pitch. The terminal is its confession. So I reviewed Paseo from the terminal.

What Paseo Actually Is

What you're actually installing: Paseo is a local daemon (~/.paseo, listening on 127.0.0.1:6767) that wraps the coding-agent CLIs you already have - Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, pi - behind one lifecycle API. It speaks to them via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP, the protocol Zed introduced), so a "Paseo agent" is really a provider session - a Claude Code session, say - that the daemon owns and multiplexes.

The headline feature is your phone. The daemon holds an outbound WebSocket to wss://relay.paseo.sh, and the mobile/web app reaches your machine through that relay after a QR pairing (paseo daemon pair) - no inbound port, no tailscale.

10.3k GitHub stars (as of 2026-07-13), AGPL-3.0, and, credit where it's due, the onboarding is genuinely smooth.

$ paseo status
Local Daemon   running
Listen         127.0.0.1:6767
Relay          wss://relay.paseo.sh:443
Providers      Claude   available (daemon)
               Codex    available (daemon)
               OpenCode available (daemon)
               pi       available (daemon)

That four-provider list is the whole pitch in one screen: one daemon, one lifecycle, four agent brands underneath it. Which is a real thing to want.

Hello Cost Twenty-Nine Cents

So I asked it to say hello.

$ paseo run "hi" --provider claude
Created workspace wks_1043f3c7…
AGENT ID          STATUS     PROVIDER TITLE
a722bba…          completed  claude   hi

It worked on the first try. It also cost more than I expected for one syllable, and it quietly created a workspace I didn't ask for. Two gotchas the quickstart won't warn you about, and both cost you real money if you skim past them.

Gotcha 1 - The Default Claude Model is Opus

My "hi" - one word in, eighteen tokens out - cost $0.29. paseo inspect <id> shows per-agent usage down to the cent, which is a genuinely nice touch. For experiments, pass --provider claude --model claude-haiku-4-5 or you're benchmarking on the priciest model in the house.

Gotcha 2 - Every Run Mints a Fresh Workspace

Notice the Created workspace wks_1043f3c7… on a one-word prompt. Reuse one with --workspace <id> or PASEO_WORKSPACE_ID, or your workspace list silently piles up run after run.

paseo inspect is where the daemon earns trust. You see the wrapped session's modes - for Claude they're literally Claude Code's permission modes (Always Ask, Accept File Edits, Plan Mode, Bypass) - plus token usage, cost, pending permissions, worktree binding, and a parent-agent field. Nothing is hidden behind the wrapper. Good.

The Permission Relay

Now for the feature the whole thing exists to sell. We broke it on purpose.

The permission relay is Paseo's real product, so I didn't take the README's word for it - I set an agent up to fail against it. Launch in default (always-ask) mode with a task that must write a file, and detach:

$ paseo run "Create a file named hello.txt containing exactly the line: paseo test ok" \
  --provider claude --model claude-haiku-4-5 --mode default -d

Eight seconds later the agent is frozen mid-task, waiting on a human it can't see. From a second terminal, I answered as that human:

$ paseo permit ls
AGENT    REQ_ID     TOOL    DESCRIPTION
b402ffb  permissi   Write   -
$ paseo permit allow b402ffb
REQUEST ID     AGENT     TOOL    RESULT
permissi       b402ffb   Write   allowed
$ paseo logs b402ffb
Done. Created hello.txt with the content "paseo test ok".

The same request lands as a push notification on the paired phone, with approve/deny buttons. This works exactly as advertised - the permission prompt escapes the terminal the agent lives in, and you can answer it from the couch.

If your pain is "I'm chained to my desk because Claude Code asks permission every twenty minutes," Paseo solves precisely that, today, and does it well.

What the Relay Is, in Ladder Terms

An agent freezes on a Write, the request surfaces in paseo permit ls (and on your phone), you tap allow, it finishes. On the supervision ladder, that's a polished L2 - permission relay: it moves the human decision to a better surface. It does not remove the human. Same person, better couch - which is the ceiling of L2, not a knock on Paseo's execution of it.

That distinction - better surface vs. fewer humans - is the whole review, and it's worth being fair about how much surface Paseo actually ships.

The Surface Is Deeper Than the Wrapper

This is where I expected a thin wrapper and found a real product. The CLI is broad, and several of these I'd happily use:

Two of these are quietly excellent. --output-schema gives you structured output from an interactive coding agent, which is rare and genuinely useful. And import lets you bring a session you started in a plain terminal under daemon management after the fact - a thoughtful escape hatch most wrappers skip.

On steering - running, watching, and approving agents from anywhere - Paseo is best-in-class, and I'm saying that as someone who ships a competitor. The worktree isolation, the phone app, the terminals-over-relay: all real, all polished.

So the honest question isn't whether it's good. It's where it stops.

Where It Stops (Measured, Not Assumed)

Three limits matter if you're evaluating Paseo seriously - and none of them are knocks on its polish. They're about a different job than the one it's built for.

1. Supervision Means You, Faster - Not You, Removed

The relay moves the human decision to your pocket; it doesn't take the human out of the loop. There is no policy engine that fires at the agent's turn-end - nothing that says "when the agent claims done, run lint + tests, have a second model try to refute the diff, and stage the commit until a human acks." Schedules and loops re-run prompts; they don't verify outcomes. That's the jump from L2 to L3/L4 on the ladder, and it's the jump Paseo doesn't make.

The critique isn't mine - it's from the reviewers. From a 2026 cross-device Paseo review: a supervision layer makes it easier to watch and review agents, but it cannot improve a model that produces bad edits or fix a misdiagnosed bottleneck. A nicer approval surface still hands you the same diff to judge.

2. Your Tools Don't Ride Along

Paseo injects its own control tools into the agents it runs - that's how permit/chat/terminal reach the model - but there's no mechanism to register your tool once and have every agent (Claude, Codex, OpenCode) see it. Each provider keeps its own MCP config; the daemon isn't a tool bus. If you want one capability visible to every agent brand, that's still manual, per-provider labor with your name on it.

3. The Daemon's Own MCP Surface Is Off by Default

My first probe of 127.0.0.1:6767 returned 404s on the obvious MCP paths - because the MCP server is config-gated. Set daemon.mcp.enabled in ~/.paseo/config.json and the daemon exposes its control surface (agent lifecycle, terminals, schedules, worktrees, permission handling, voice) as MCP tools, so a Claude Desktop or Codex session can drive Paseo.

Credit, then the caveat. That flag turns Paseo into a real drivable-from-agents surface - a legitimately nice property. But what it exposes is Paseo's own control tools, not a bus for distributing your tools into the agents it runs. Point 2 still stands.

None of that makes Paseo worse at its job. It makes it a different rung than the one I build for - which is the fair way to end a review a competitor wrote.

The Verdict, and Where It Genuinely Beats Us

Use Paseo if your bottleneck is being physically present. You run two to five Claude Code / Codex sessions, permission prompts are what shreds your day, and you want to approve them from the couch - with worktrees, schedules, structured output, and a phone app that, honestly, is nicer than most. It's free, open source, self-hosted, and the polish is not a facade. On steering, it beats us.

Look further if your bottleneck is trust at scale. You want the "done" claim checked by something other than the agent that made it, commits staged behind verification, one tool you wrote visible to every agent brand, or a gate that survives your laptop closing. That's the layer I build agentproto for - and the two aren't rivals on the same repo: nothing stops a Paseo-steered session and an externally-gated one from coexisting.

The Daemon Tax, Named Fairly

Adding an orchestration daemon means a failed run can now originate in the provider, the daemon, the client, or the relay - the debugging and threat surface genuinely grows. That's true of Paseo and true of agentproto; it's the cost of the shape, not of either tool. (Also flagged in VibeCodingHub's Paseo review.)

If you're just meeting this series, the map is: You can't parallelize the trust (why steering more agents doesn't scale), the supervision ladder (the five rungs Paseo sits low on, deliberately and well), and routing by cost (why the checking layer has to reach cheap models Paseo doesn't gate).

Paseo is an excellent answer to "how do I steer agents from anywhere." It just isn't trying to answer "what - other than me - decides my agent is done."

A README would never tell you that. Its terminal did, in two commands and twenty-nine cents.

If I've mis-read where Paseo stops, or a flag I missed already does the thing I say it can't, tell me exactly which - I'll re-run it and fix the piece.

The Series - Orchestration, Honestly

Ten pieces, one argument. Start anywhere; each one cross-links the rest.

Written by the maintainer of agentproto (Apache-2.0, source). Same contract as our /compare page - dated facts, named strengths, corrections by issue. Got something wrong? File an issue.