Quorum Agents

Real capture, not scripted: the Team Lead (a normal Claude Code session in the editor) dispatches one task to three automotive agents. They negotiate the split among themselves — you can watch each agent's live terminal — then each reports its own slice back.

No API costs. Really.

Quorum does not use the Anthropic API and never asks for an API key. Every agent is a real claude session started through the official Claude Agent SDK, authenticated by the Claude Code login you already have. If you have a Claude subscription that runs Claude Code, you can run a whole team of agents at no extra cost beyond your plan's usage limits.

Related MCP server: Orchestrator MCP Server

Why

Claude Code subagents are fire-and-forget child tasks: they can't talk to each other, and you can't talk to them while they work. Quorum flips the model:

• Every agent is a persistent, named Claude Code session with its own specialty, model, and permission mode.

• Agents message each other — ask questions, split work, object, converge — over a documented MCP tool surface.

• Your own editor session becomes the Team Lead. Quorum exposes a local MCP bridge; the Claude Code session you already work in connects to it and orchestrates the team — decomposes work, collects replies, synthesizes. The intelligence coordinating your agents is the same one you code with.

• Everything is visualized live: message comets fly between agent blocks, violet when the Team Lead speaks, cyan for everything else.

Highlights

How it works

flowchart LR
    subgraph editor["Your editor / CLI"]
      L["Claude Code session<br/>(the Team Lead)"]
    end
    subgraph app["Quorum desktop app"]
      B["MCP bridge<br/>127.0.0.1:8484"]
      Q["Message bus<br/>FIFO queues · turn budgets · delivery rules"]
      A1["agent session"]
      A2["agent session"]
      A3["agent session"]
    end
    U["You<br/>(composer)"] --> Q
    L -- "ask · roster · replies" --> B --> Q
    Q <--> A1
    Q <--> A2
    Q <--> A3

Quorum itself never calls a model. It transports and visualizes messages; all intelligence lives in your Claude sessions. The rules that matter — reply budgets, queuing, delivery guarantees — are enforced in the application layer, not written into prompts and hoped for.

Quickstart

Prerequisites: macOS (developed there; npm start is portable), Node 24+, and Claude Code installed and logged in (claude on your PATH).

git clone https://github.com/birol91/quorum-agents.git
cd quorum-agents
npm install
npm start

1. Pick a project folder from the welcome screen (or reopen a recent one).

2. Open the Marketplace and add up to 5 agents — or create your own with a name, description, and persona.

3. Type in the composer. Plain text tasks the whole team; @agent-name targets one; select several blocks to task exactly that group.

Connect your Team Lead (optional, and the best part). In the project where you run Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http quorum http://127.0.0.1:8484/mcp

Then just tell your editor session things like "split this refactor across the team and collect their findings" — it will use the bridge's ask / roster / replies tools, and you'll watch the whole conversation play out on the canvas.

Addressing modes

Agent marketplace — credits

The 377-agent catalog bundled in .claude/agents/ is generated from three excellent MIT-licensed collections. All credit to their authors — Quorum only repackages the prompts with marketplace metadata:

Regenerate or extend the catalog with scripts/import-agents.mjs.

Design principles

1. Documented interfaces only. Agents run through the official Agent SDK; the lead connects over MCP; model switches use --resume. No PTY automation, no transcript scraping, no state inference — if the answer to "how do we know this?" would be "we guessed from a side channel," the design is rejected.

2. Mechanism over prompt. Turn budgets, reply grants, queueing, and delivery guarantees live in the app layer where they can't be talked out of.

3. The app is not an AI. Quorum produces no content and proxies no model calls. It is plumbing and glass.

Development

npm test              # unit tests (bus mechanics, decisions, tasks, team)
npm run typecheck     # strict TypeScript
npm run dev           # vite + electron with hot renderer
npm run package:mac   # build a DMG (electron-builder, arm64)

License

MIT © birol91

Quorum is an independent open-source project built on the official Claude Code CLI and Agent SDK. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic; "Claude" is a trademark of Anthropic, PBC. Bundled marketplace agents remain under their original MIT licenses — see credits.