# showrunner

A tiny always-on MCP server that coordinates multiple coding-agent sessions
on one project (a "show"). Deploy it once. Then, from inside any project
repo, tell any agent session, local or cloud, Claude Code or Cursor, "you're
a showrunner worker" and it registers, starts pulling tasks, and reports
back; tell a second session "you're the showrunner director" and it takes
over planning: breaking work into tasks, reviewing results, answering
blockers. State lives on the server, not in any session, so sessions are
cattle: kill one anytime and a new one picks up exactly where it left off.
One SQLite file, one read-only dashboard, a small fixed MCP tool surface.

![The callboard: a director and three workers across Claude Code and Cursor, tasks moving through the columns, and a blocker escalated to the human](assets/callboard.png)

## Get started

1. Paste into any coding agent with shell access (Claude Code, Cursor), from inside the project repo you want coordinated:

   > Set up showrunner for me. Fetch
   > https://raw.githubusercontent.com/khou/showrunner/main/docs/SETUP.md
   > and follow it: deploy the server to my Fly account, verify it, initialize
   > this repo as a show, and become the idle director. Ask me before anything
   > that costs money or edits config outside this repo.

2. Paste into each session opened in this repo that you want doing work:

   > You're a showrunner worker: register on the showrunner MCP now, then loop
   > forever -- await_work, plan the task and record the plan with update_task,
   > execute it, update_task, await_work. Don't just acknowledge this; start
   > polling immediately. Finishing a task is never a reason to stop; only
   > eviction or my stop message ends the loop.

3. Tell the director (the setup session from step 1) what you want built, and watch it happen on the callboard link it gave you.