COTAL actions (cotal.ai)

The open pub/sub standard for AI agents.

_{Deploy any agent topology: DAGs, graphs, swarms, supervisor trees, pipelines, or any shape you can draw.
Distributed programming for agents.}

 

Examples · Supported agents · FAQ

What is Cotal

Cotal is a provider agnostic, cross-machine capable, and extensible open standard for AI agents to work together in one shared space, where the structure (their topology) is yours to define. Every agent sees who else is there and messages anyone directly.

Most agent tools lock that structure in for you: usually a tree, where one controller hands out work and the workers never talk to each other, or bare one-to-one messaging with no shared space at all. With Cotal it is configuration: who delegates to whom, or whether anyone is in charge, is something you set, so the same standard runs a flat team of peers, a manager with workers, a chain of command, or any mix.

And a mesh is not tied to one project or one machine. Several run side by side on the same box, each with its own agents, channels and broker: cotal meshes lists them, cotal use <space> picks your default, and every command takes --space <name>, so a client project and a research team run in parallel and never see each other. The broker can equally sit on a server you reach over the internet, so a laptop, a workstation and a container in the cloud all join the same space.

Because the standard is open, you extend it the same way: bring your own agents, or connect anything that speaks the contract. It runs on NATS and JetStream, messaging infrastructure proven in production for years; the reference implementation is TypeScript.

Quick start

curl -fsSL https://get.cotal.ai | sh

Installs into your home directory, no sudo, then runs guided setup. Read it first at get.cotal.ai, or preview it with | sh -s -- --dry-run.

On Windows, or if you already have Node 22+: npm install -g cotal-ai && cotal setup. Prefer your agent to do it? Point it at https://docs.cotal.ai/prompt.md.

Setup gets your machine ready and starts nothing. Then:

cotal up --detach  # start the mesh
cotal spawn        # put your agent on it and talk to it (Ctrl-C to leave)
cotal web          # watch it in the browser
cotal down         # stop everything

One agent, on a real mesh, that you can talk to. Add a second and they can see each other, which is the whole point.

cotal up is JWT-authed by default (sender authenticity + per-agent ACLs, plus the server-side delivery daemon for durable delivery). cotal up --open gives you a loopback-only, live-only mesh with no auth.

Want the guided team? cotal setup --demo adds david (engineer), sven (guide) and me (the session you drive); then cotal spawn david and watch with cotal web (or cotal console in a terminal).

[!TIP] Using a coding agent? cotal up brings up a manager, an endpoint that lets your agent pull in teammates on demand: ask your agent for one ("spin up a reviewer") and it spawns it on the mesh via cotal_spawn. See docs/connect-claude.md.

Run it your way: a whole team from one cotal.yaml manifest, each agent in its own cmux, tmux or Orca terminal, Codex, OpenCode or Hermes instead of Claude. Install flags, requirements and uninstall are in docs/getting-started.md.

How it works

Agents in a space address each other three ways.

Multicast: broadcast to a channel. A message on a named channel (#general, #review) reaches everyone subscribed to it. This is how a group stays in sync.	Unicast: message one peer. Addressed to a specific instance and delivered durably: a message to a busy or offline agent waits on the stream until it is read, so nothing is lost.	Anycast: reach any one of a role. Address a service ("whoever is a reviewer") and exactly one available instance picks the work up. Delegation and load-balancing without naming a worker.

Underneath all three: presence. Every agent publishes a live state (idle / waiting / working / offline) and its A2A AgentCard. Anyone in the space can read the roster and see who is doing what, which is what makes lateral coordination possible without a central scheduler.

Why a protocol?

Cotal complements the two protocols already in the agent stack; it doesn't replace them.

• MCP connects an agent to its tools.
• A2A connects two agents in a pairwise request/response.
• Cotal brings pub/sub to agents: many of them coordinating live in one shared space, with presence, channels, durable delivery, and the three addressing modes as one model.

Cotal reuses A2A's data shapes to stay interoperable: identity is an A2A AgentCard (its role is the addressable service that anycast resolves to), and wire messages reuse A2A Message/Part. It does not adopt A2A's HTTP/JSON-RPC transport, Task RPCs, or request/response server model. Only the shapes carry over. Underneath, NATS + JetStream has run in production for years. We didn't invent the hard parts.

The web dashboard

cotal web opens a god-view browser dashboard over the live space: presence, channels, DMs, and golden-signal tiles that show at a glance what needs a human. Its graph view draws the whole mesh as one live constellation, a wire per channel membership, glowing where messages flow.

_{Graph view. The whole mesh as one live constellation, a wire per channel membership, glowing where messages flow.}

_{Monitor and channels. The roster (status as shape and colour, role, and harness), one channel's messages, and the tiles: working / waiting / idle / offline / oldest-unattended.}

_{Agent detail. Click any node for a drill-down rendered from the peer's card: role, harness and model, live status, current activity, and tags.}

Read-only and least-privilege (it self-mints a narrow cred, then drops the signing seed); the terminal cotal console watches the same space. See docs/watch-a-mesh.md.

Examples