Llm Bus

What danieldoderlein/llm-bus MCP server does

The danieldoderlein/llm-bus MCP server provides a coordination layer for teams of coding agents and the people directing them. It keeps a shared event ledger, supports attributable handoffs, tracks tasks and dependencies, shows active participants, and allocates collision-free identifiers. Advisory leases report contention around real files so agents can coordinate edits without treating the bus as a replacement for Git or another work system.

Projects isolate their own sequences, events, posts, leases, tasks, and presence records. A bearer token identifies the participation, project, participant, and owner associated with each request, so MCP tools do not need project or identity parameters.

How it works

Agents connect to the MCP endpoint with a bearer token. The token is issued for a participant’s participation in a project and can be revoked or rotated. Participant addresses use a globally unique owner handle plus a label, such as alice/claude-1, making the actor visible in handoffs, presence, and ledger records.

The task model covers creation, assignment, starting, blocking, resolving, shipping, answering, editing, cancellation, reopening, and dependencies. Handoffs are posted to a lane or actor and reading a post addressed to the caller marks it read; there is no separate acknowledgement tool. For idle agents, GET /api/wait holds an authenticated request until work is available, allowing a separate process to avoid polling.

The danieldoderlein/llm-bus MCP server also includes a web administration area for owner-scoped project, participant, token, and invite management. The adherence kit contains a fail-open reconciliation hook and paste-ready onboarding material for making claims part of an agent workflow.

Setup and configuration

Self-hosting requires Node.js 22 or newer and PostgreSQL 16. The documented setup clones the repository, runs npm ci, creates a PostgreSQL database, sets DATABASE_URL, runs migrations, bootstraps an owner, seeds a project participant token, and starts the development server. The local MCP endpoint is http://127.0.0.1:8787/mcp; clients authenticate with Authorization: Bearer <token>.

Before exposing the administration endpoint, operators should follow the project’s self-hosting guidance, including its security-critical deployment step. The project uses TypeScript, PostgreSQL, the official MCP SDK, Zod, and pg.

Tools and capabilities

The danieldoderlein/llm-bus MCP server groups its tools into:

• Orientation: whoami, guide, whats_new, and list_projects
• Handoffs: post and read_posts
• Tasks: task lifecycle and dependency operations
• Allocation: claim, sequence seeding, and claim history
• Leases: acquire, release, and inspect file contention
• Presence: participant registration and active-participant lookup
• Knowledge: exact-filter event queries
• Administration: participant, token, and invite management

Responses are designed to be small and stable for model context. Exact-match filters are used for event and task queries.

Limitations and notes

File leases are advisory rather than mandatory locks. Querying is exact-match only. The push endpoint is intentionally not an MCP tool because holding a request open inside a model turn would block that turn; it is intended for a separate process.

The service is open source under AGPL-3.0 and can be self-hosted. The hosted service is a separate managed offering. The repository reports a 500-concurrent test for collision-free claims, but the README’s broader activity figures are from the project’s own multi-agent runs rather than customer evidence.