What Z.E.N. is

Z.E.N. is a place to save the AI work you keep doing by hand.

The longer version: a workflow is a short file with steps. Each step is a prompt, a small piece of code, a sub-agent call, or a CLI tool. Z.E.N. runs the steps in order, manages dependencies between them, captures the output, and either drops the result in front of you or hands it back to whatever called the workflow in the first place. You run it on demand, set it to repeat on a schedule, or dispatch it from inside your existing agent.

The model isn't baked in. You can choose a different provider per step, swap models without rewriting the workflow, and run the whole thing on your laptop, a cloud box, or a small server. Z.E.N. is the layer that stays still while the rest of the stack moves.

Most AI tooling pushes you the other way. You stand there describing a meal in real time, the model improvises, you taste, you correct, you re-prompt. That works for one meal. It collapses the moment you need the same meal again next Tuesday. Z.E.N. is what happens after you've improvised the meal a few times and you're ready to write it down. Ingredients are the tools and connectors. Steps are the nodes. The kitchen is the execution environment.

What a workflow looks like

name: morning-brief
description: Summarize what's new in Slack and Notion since yesterday.

nodes:
  - id: pull-slack
    type: prompt
    prompt: |
      Summarize unread messages from #team and #leadership since yesterday 6pm.
      Quote anyone who tagged me.

  - id: pull-notion
    type: prompt
    prompt: |
      Find pages edited in the last 24 hours under Strategy and Product.
      Return titles plus a one-line summary each.

  - id: combine
    type: prompt
    depends_on: [pull-slack, pull-notion]
    prompt: |
      Combine the Slack summary and the Notion edits into a single brief.
      Headline at top, sections below.

That's the entire shape of a workflow. Three steps, two run in parallel, one waits to combine them. You can write it yourself, copy a bundled one, or describe it in English and let the builder write it for you.

Who Z.E.N. is for

You probably already spend two hours a day in Claude, ChatGPT, Hermes, OpenClaw, or Claude Code. You're fluent in slash commands. You know which model handles which task. You build prompt scaffolds in Notion or a private repo. You ship words, research, decks, campaigns, content. You don't ship pull requests.

Z.E.N. is built for that user. The audience this product expects is sophisticated about AI and unbothered by keyboard-first interfaces; the audience this product does not expect is someone who needs a tour of what a model is.

Engineers use Z.E.N. too. The coding workflows live under an Advanced tab, the way any product tucks its power-user surface a click away from the default view.

What Z.E.N. is not

Z.E.N. is not a chat UI. It has one (the Web UI), and you'll use it when you want to fire a workflow without typing a command, but the chat is a surface, not the product.

Z.E.N. is not a replacement for your favorite agent. Claude Code stays Claude Code. Hermes stays Hermes. Z.E.N. sits behind them and runs the structured work they're not built to handle.

Z.E.N. is not a no-code platform. There's no canvas with boxes and lines. Workflows are short YAML files. You can write them by hand, generate them from a description, or copy one from the bundled set. If "YAML" sounds like a problem, the workflow builder will write it for you; you'll never need to read it.

Next

• How it works to see the example above run end to end.
• Concepts for the short vocabulary list.
• Install when you want to skip the explanation and try it.