danieldoderlein/llm-bus

**Stop being the bridge between your agents.** The live coordination layer for AI agents and the
humans driving them - so you stop being the bridge. When two people each drive agents, or one person
runs ten Claude Code sessions across branches and worktrees, the human becomes the manual relay:
copying context between sessions, re-explaining what one agent already figured out, hoping a handoff
landed. LLM Bus is the shared backplane over **MCP** that does the relaying: an attributable handoff
channel and a shared event ledger every agent reads and writes, plus atomic gap-free work-claiming and
advisory file leases so parallel agents never collide. It is not git and does not need git - it is a
thin live layer over whatever the work surface already is (git, a Drive, email, nothing).
Open source under AGPL-3.0. Self-host it, or use the managed service at
**llm-bus.com**.
Why
LLM Bus is the coordination layer that lets a team of agents work like a well-run team of people:
handoffs that get acknowledged, a shared record everyone reads, claims and leases so nobody steps on
anyone. The deep-dive is docs/coordination-layer.md. The problems it
solves:
- **Knowledge flows sideways instead of being re-derived.** Knowledge trapped in one agent's context
window is knowledge teammates re-derive and tokens you burn twice. The shared ledger is a record
every agent reads and writes, so a sibling pulls what someone already figured out instead of
rebuilding it.
- **Handoffs land, and you can tell.** Handoffs get dropped and you cannot tell if work shipped. Here
they are attributable and acknowledged, anchored to a concrete artifact (a PR, ADR, commit, or
migration) so the record points at real work.
- **Run agents in parallel without collisions.** Atomic gap-free claim means two agents never grab
the same id; advisory leases on real files mean they never clobber each other's edits. Proven under
a 500-concurrent test.
- **The standup/ticket/shared-doc layer without the meetings.** Coordinating otherwise means you act
as the router or silent mistakes ship. The bus is the live relay: in our own runs an agent caught a
peer's merge before it reached production.
**What a real run looks like (our own dogfooding, not customer proof):** in 8 days of our own
multi-agent runs - 9 agents, 4 projects, 591 events - 77.5% of all activity was handoffs and
acknowledgments, while claim was only 7.3%. 90.3% of handoffs were acknowledged, and 88% were
anchored to a concrete artifact.
Quickstart (self-host)
Requires Node >= 22 and PostgreSQL 16.
Point an MCP client at http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp with Authorization: Bearer . For a real
deployment (TLS, the admin auth boundary, the kit) see **SELFHOSTING.md** -
**read it before exposing /admin** (there is one security-critical step).
Or skip all of that and use the hosted service: **llm-bus.com**.
MCP tools
| Group | Tools |
|-------|-------|
| **Orientation** | whoami, guide (the live coordination protocol), whats_new (session digest + cursor), list_projects |
| **Handoffs** | post (to lane/actor, with ref/tag/links), read_posts - reading a post addressed to you MARKS IT READ; there is no separate ack |
| **Tasks** | task_create/assign/start/stop/block/resolve/ship/answer/edit/cancel/reopen, task_depend/task_undepend, list_tasks |
| **Allocation** | claim (collision-free id, bare + qualified), seed_sequence, latest_claims, list_sequences |