What is the difference between Turbo Flow and Turbo Rig?

Turbo Flow is the open-source rules layer: rig-lite, a portable MIT-licensed governance kit — a cross-model review gate, constitution template, git-versioned memory pattern and self-tests — that you drop into any repo, with any harness. Turbo Rig is the integrated successor: the same components plus scheduled automations, running as one always-on system across your repos, in private beta.

Should I use Turbo Flow or Turbo Rig?

Use Turbo Flow (rig-lite) if you want governance for your own agents in your own repos today — it is public, ten-minute install, no dependencies. Use Turbo Rig if you want the integrated, always-on version — gate verdicts as PR comments, cross-repo fleet health, scheduled automations — and are willing to join the private beta.

~/turbo-flow — FAQ open source ⇄ beta

Turbo Flow vs Turbo Rig

The short answer: Turbo Flow is the open-source rules layer — rig-lite, a portable governance kit you can drop into any repo today. Turbo Rig is the integrated successor: the same gate, constitution, memory and review running as one always-on system across your repos — currently in private beta. One is a kit; the other is a rig. How they got here: the pivot essay.

Published Oct 7, 2026 · Updated Oct 8, 2026

The exact line

	Turbo Flow (rig-lite)	Turbo Rig
what it is	a portable governance kit — files in your repo	an integrated, always-on system on your machine
availability	public, MIT-licensed, on GitHub	private beta — request access
review gate	`gate.sh` on demand: `--pr`, `--sweep`, any checkout via `-C`	the gate wired into the workflow: verdicts as PR comments, GitHub as the state machine
constitution	template — your laws, your repo	the ten-law spine, enforced across every governed repo
memory	the git-versioned memory pattern	cross-repo, consolidated on a schedule
automations	a prompt pack: nine scheduled tasks you host yourself	running as part of the rig — morning digest, sweeps, canaries
harness	bring your own (ZCode, Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Grok)	same principle: swappable builder/reviewer/reserve lanes
setup	ten minutes, bash only, no dependencies	one command installs and wires it all
merge authority	human, in both — non-negotiable

How they're related

Not competitors — extract and source. Turbo Rig runs in production and keeps extracting its portable parts downward: v5.1's gate v2 and automations pack came out of the beta; v5.2's tokens.py dashboard was the first explicit open-core drop. Everything that proves general in the rig eventually lands in the kit; everything that needs integration stays in the rig. Same spine, two form factors.

Which one fits you

Your repo, your agents, today → Turbo Flow. It's public, it's ten minutes, and it fails closed in front of you before you trust it.
A fleet of repos, always-on governance, automations included → Turbo Rig beta.
Not sure? → start with the kit; the rig subscribes to the same AGENTS.md convention, so nothing you adopt is thrown away.

The other common comparisons

Turbo Flow vs Claude Code / Codex / Cursor — the wrong comparison, on purpose. Those are harnesses; Turbo Flow is the rules layer around whichever harness you bring. Complementary by design. (More: what an agentic development environment is.)
Turbo Flow vs Ruflo — that's not a rivalry, that's this project's own history: v4 wrapped Ruflo; v5 points at it for optional orchestration and governs it like anything else. (version history)
Turbo Rig vs a multi-agent swarm — the conceptual comparison that matters most: orchestration vs governance.