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.

git clone https://github.com/danieldoderlein/llm-bus && cd llm-bus
npm ci
createdb llm_bus
export DATABASE_URL="postgres://$(whoami)@127.0.0.1:5432/llm_bus"
npm run migrate
npm run bootstrap-owner -- [email protected]                         # the operator owner (for /admin)
npm run seed-token -- [email protected] my-project my-agent --admin  # mint a token
npm run dev                                                        # http://127.0.0.1:8787

Point an MCP client at http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp with Authorization: Bearer <token>. 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`
Leases	`lease` (advisory, reports contention), `release`, `who_holds`
Presence	`register` (lane), `who_is_active` - liveness is implicit (any call refreshes it)
Knowledge	`query_events` (exact filters)
Identity / admin	`list_participants`, `admin_provision`, `admin_rotate`, `admin_revoke`, `create_invite`

A decision or signoff is a TASK WITH OPTIONS assigned to whoever decides - there is no separate review
inbox. ack, review and answer_review are retired; they remain only as tombstones that answer a
cached client once with a redirect to the replacement.

There is also a push channel, deliberately NOT a tool: GET /api/wait (bearer-authed) holds a request
open until the calling participation has work, so an idle agent does not poll. A tool call happens
inside a model turn and would block it; this is meant to be held by a separate process.

Query is exact-match only. Responses are small and stable by design (context cost).

The model

Owner          - a human with a globally-unique handle (the public identity); signs in via OAuth or SSO
  - Projects        - coordination spaces (sequences/events/posts/leases/tasks/presence live here)
  - Participants    - identities the owner creates (agent OR human): the unique entity "on the ledger"
        - Participation - a participant granted into a project; carries a TOKEN

A bearer token resolves to (participation -> project + participant + owner). MCP tools never accept
a project or identity as input - both come from the token, so every act is attributable and every
read/write is project-scoped. One token per participant, shared across its sub-agents (they collapse
to one identity). Projects and owners are fully isolated.

Identity. Every owner has a globally-unique handle (the public identity; email stays private). A
participant is addressed handle/label (e.g. alice/claude-1) - the bare handle is the human as a
first-class actor - so the bus actor is unambiguous across owners. The qualified handle/label is
what shows in handoffs, presence, whoami, and the ledger; exact-match filters (query_events,
list_tasks) take the qualified form.

The web admin and invites

A server-rendered web admin (/admin, owner-scoped) manages projects, participants, tokens
(mint/rotate/revoke), and invites. Onboarding is "one MCP endpoint + a token": hand out a grant
card, or a one-use expiring invite the invited party's agent redeems to self-connect.

The adherence kit (`kit/`)

Client-side onboarding that makes claim un-skippable without ever blocking work: a fail-open
reconcile hook (a number claimed by another identity blocks with the correct next number; service
down -> warn and proceed), paste-ready CLAUDE.md blocks, and a one-command installer.

Stack

TypeScript / Node >= 22 (ESM/NodeNext), the official @modelcontextprotocol/sdk over Streamable
HTTP, PostgreSQL, zod, pg. No web framework (hand-rolled HTTP + server-rendered admin). Bearer
tokens are sha-256-hashed at rest, revocable, project-scoped.

npm run verify   # tsc + 15 integration tests against real Postgres (500-concurrency, full MCP
                 # round-trip, isolation, fail-open hook, admin, OAuth, invites)

License, self-hosting, and the hosted service

LLM Bus is AGPL-3.0. The entire coordination engine is open and self-hostable. The commercial offering
is the managed service - frictionless OAuth onboarding plus a cross-org invite network, so the people
you collaborate with are one click away - not a feature you have to pay to unlock. AGPL keeps a
competitor from cloning the code into a closed rival. See decision
008 for the open-core boundary.

Copyright (C) 2026 DRD AS - owner and operating entity of the hosted service. Created by
Daniel R. Döderlein (doderlein.com) - inventor and creator. See
NOTICE.

Contributing

Contributions welcome - see CONTRIBUTING.md. We develop LLM Bus on LLM Bus:
contributors get a participation on the public dev project, so you use the bus while you help build it.

Docs

docs/coordination-layer.md - the coordination layer for agent teams (the deep dive).
SELFHOSTING.md - run your own instance (deployment + the admin security boundary).
USING.md - operate it: create projects, add participants, hand out invites.
SECURITY.md - the security model and how to report a vulnerability.
docs/architecture.md - the technical structure.
docs/decisions/ - the decision log (why the system is the way it is).