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 -- you@example.com                         # the operator owner (for /admin)
npm run seed-token -- you@example.com 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).