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 `. 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

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).