What is ChatDev?
ChatDev is a virtual software company that translates your ideas into functional applications using a team of collaborative AI agents. You provide the concept in natural language, and ChatDev orchestrates a complete development lifecycle—from design and coding to testing and documentation—handled by specialized AI personas. It’s built for developers, researchers, and innovators who want to rapidly prototype software or explore the power of automated, multi-agent collaboration.
Key Features
💬 Natural Language Prototyping Simply describe your software concept in plain English. ChatDev translates your idea into a detailed plan and assigns tasks to its AI agents, taking your project from concept to runnable code without you needing to write the initial boilerplate. This dramatically accelerates the journey from idea to a working first version.
🤖 Autonomous Multi-Agent Collaboration Witness a virtual team in action. ChatDev simulates a complete software company with specialized AI agents for roles like CEO, Product Officer, Programmer, and Tester. This structured collaboration, where agents participate in "seminars" to design, code, and review, ensures a more robust and well-thought-out development process compared to single-model generation.
🔧 Extensible and Customizable Framework Go beyond the default setup to suit your specific needs. ChatDev allows you to define your own development workflows (ChatChains), create custom phases (like a unique security review step), and design new agent roles. This flexibility makes it a powerful sandbox for researching agent dynamics and tailoring automated workflows.
📊 Advanced Collaboration Models Leveraging recent advancements like Multi-Agent Collaboration Networks (MacNet), ChatDev supports complex, scalable task-oriented cooperation among hundreds of agents. This research-backed foundation allows the framework to tackle more than just software development, extending its capabilities to logical reasoning, data analysis, and creative generation.
How ChatDev Solves Your Problems:
For Rapid Prototyping: You have an idea for a utility or a simple game but lack the time for initial setup and coding. With ChatDev, you can describe "a 2048 game" or "a pomodoro timer app" and receive a working Python application in minutes, allowing you to validate your concept instantly.
For Research and Learning: As a student or AI researcher studying collective intelligence, you need a practical environment for experimentation. ChatDev provides a transparent and customizable platform to observe, modify, and analyze how AI agents collaborate, make decisions, and solve problems as a team. The included visualizer lets you watch the entire process unfold.
For Automating Development Tasks: You need to generate a script for a specific task, like parsing a log file or automating a report. Instead of writing it from scratch, you can delegate the task to your ChatDev "company," which will deliver a documented and tested script, freeing you up for more complex work.
Unique Advantages
The primary advantage of ChatDev is its structured, team-based approach. Unlike single-prompt code generators that can produce disconnected or incomplete results, ChatDev's multi-agent system mirrors a real-world development team. This division of labor—from high-level planning by the "CEO" to detailed code review by the "Reviewer"—results in a more coherent, logical, and well-vetted final product. This process-oriented methodology is its core differentiator, leading to higher-quality automated output.
Conclusion:
ChatDev offers a uniquely powerful and insightful way to automate software creation. Whether you're looking to build prototypes faster, automate routine coding, or research the frontiers of AI collaboration, this framework provides a robust and transparent platform to turn ideas into reality.





