🌉 ekip

Make your coding agents work as a team.

A vendor-neutral coordination hub that lets Claude Code, Google Antigravity, and any headless CLI agent delegate tasks to each other and share context — droppable into any project.

plan → debate → code → review → audit — an Opus architect, a Sonnet reviewer, and a Gemini coder shipped a feature together in 5m39s, unattended, using this hub.

🇻🇳 Hướng dẫn tiếng Việt

Why

Coding agents are getting great — but they work alone. The tools that do connect them are one-way ("use agent B as a tool inside agent A") or heavy (tmux supervisors, Python stacks). ekip takes a different shape:

• Symmetric peers. No agent is the boss. Everything flows through one hub, so either side can delegate to the other — including you, from the dashboard or CLI.

• A shared blackboard. Headless runs are one-shot; context survives on a key/value blackboard all agents read and write (plan.v1, review.round1, …).

• Only sanctioned surfaces. MCP servers + each vendor's official headless CLI (claude -p, agy -p). No scraping, no automation around rate limits.

• npm-light. One package, three dependencies, a single-file dashboard, no build steps at runtime.

flowchart LR
    subgraph hub["ekip hub · one per project"]
        Q["task queue<br/>pending → claimed → done"]
        B["context blackboard"]
        D["dispatcher + watchdog"]
    end
    CC["Claude Code"] <-- MCP --> hub
    AG["Antigravity"] <-- MCP --> hub
    YOU(["you · dashboard /ui · CLI"]) --> hub
    D -. "spawns headless<br/>claude -p / agy -p / any CLI" .-> W["one-shot worker runs"]
    W -- MCP --> hub

Related MCP server: agent-bus-mcp

Quickstart

npm install -g @swtiit/ekip      # the installed command is `ekip`

cd /any/project
ekip init      # writes config + prints the MCP snippets to paste
ekip serve     # hub + dashboard, one terminal tab

init prints exactly what to paste into each agent (Claude Code's .mcp.json, Antigravity's global config — including the permission grants headless runs need). Then, from any connected agent or your own terminal:

ekip run coder "Add input validation to src/api/users.ts"

task 54d00e94 → coder · dashboard: http://127.0.0.1:4319/ui

21:39:00  ● working  conductor  Feature pipeline: slugify
21:39:57    ✔ done  planner  Plan slugify implementation (51s)
             └ Plan stored at slug1.plan.v1: NFD-decompose + Mn-strip…
21:41:29    ✔ done  critic  SCORE:93
21:42:06    ✔ done  agy  Implement slugify.py + tests (30s)
             └ Self-verified: ALL TESTS PASSED
21:44:30  ✔ done  conductor  Feature pipeline: slugify (5m39s)

━━ DONE ━━ · auditor verdict: SHIP

How a delegation works

sequenceDiagram
    participant A as agent A
    participant H as hub
    participant B as agent B (spawned)
    A->>H: bridge_delegate(to: B)
    H->>H: task created (pending)
    H-->>B: dispatcher spawns B's headless CLI
    B->>H: bridge_claim(task_id)
    Note over B: does the work<br/>reads/writes the blackboard
    B->>H: bridge_post_result(done, artifacts)
    A->>H: bridge_wait(task_id)
    H-->>A: final task state

Eight MCP tools cover the whole protocol: bridge_delegate, bridge_claim, bridge_post_result, bridge_wait, bridge_task_get, bridge_list_tasks, bridge_context_set, bridge_context_get. Full contract in PROTOCOL.md.

Three ways to watch and drive it

Multi-agent pipelines

The examples ship a field-tested crew and flow:

• examples/roles/ — standing "role skills" (conductor, planner, critic, coder, reviewer, auditor). Point an agent's promptFile at one and every spawn carries its persona, checklists, and output contracts.

• examples/feature-pipeline.md — the full flow: plan → debate (to SCORE ≥ 90, capped) → code → review loop (capped) → audit (SHIP/HOLD) → human-readable report. Hub-and-spoke, so delegation depth stays ≤ 2 no matter how many stages.

• examples/mini-pipeline.md — the 3-stage starter version, plus the hard-won "iron rules" for conductors.

Configuration

ekip.config.json, one per project:

{
  "project": "my-project",
  "host": "127.0.0.1",
  "port": 4319,
  "agents": [
    { "name": "planner", "adapter": "claude",
      "args": ["--model", "claude-opus-4-8", "--effort", "high"],
      "promptFile": ".ekip/roles/planner.md" },
    { "name": "coder", "adapter": "antigravity",
      "args": ["--model", "Gemini 3.5 Flash (High)"] },
    { "name": "codex", "adapter": "command",
      "command": "codex", "args": ["exec", "{prompt}"] },
    { "name": "me", "adapter": "claude", "spawnable": false }
  ],
  "maxDepth": 6,
  "watchdog": { "pendingTtlSeconds": 600, "claimedTtlSeconds": 3600 }
}

• Machine defaults: once a project's cast feels right, run ekip init --global there — it saves the agents and role files to ~/.ekip/. Every future ekip init materializes that cast (and wires .mcp.json) automatically, so a new project is just init && serve. Project files always win over machine defaults, field by field; role promptFiles resolve in the project first, then ~/.ekip/roles/ by filename.

• Model-per-role: register the same adapter several times with different --model args — delegating to a name picks a model.

• spawnable: false registers an agent that polls (bridge_claim) instead of being auto-launched — e.g. a session you drive interactively.

• promptFile prepends a markdown role to every spawn of that agent.

• The command adapter plugs in any CLI with {prompt}, {hubUrl}, {taskId}, {agent}, {depth} templating — no code required.

• Project-level knowledge (conventions, lint, CI) belongs in each tool's native files — CLAUDE.md / .claude/skills/ and AGENTS.md — which spawned runs pick up automatically.

Letting spawned agents edit files

Out of the box a spawned run can only talk to the bridge. For real coding (all field-tested):

• Claude Code: add "--permission-mode", "acceptEdits" to the agent's args; allowlist specific commands via --allowedTools "Bash(npm test:*)".

• Antigravity: headless agy soft-denies anything needing a prompt, and a single denial kills the whole run. Grants live in ~/.gemini/config/config.json under userSettings.globalPermissionGrants.allow: "mcp(ekip/*)" for the bridge tools, "write_file(*)" for a coder (scope tighter if you like), plus "command(<cmd>)" for each command it may run. The adapter always passes --add-dir <cwd> — without it, headless runs write into agy's scratch directory instead of your project.

The watchdog (and the quota question)

Spawned agents die silently more often than you'd hope — quota exhaustion (Claude's "session limit", agy's silent 429 exit), permission denials, missing binaries. The hub sweeps orphaned tasks past their TTL to failed and greps the spawn log for the reason, so the dashboard tells you watchdog: no claim within 600s — spawn log hints: "You've hit your session limit…" instead of hanging forever.

Neither vendor exposes remaining quota programmatically today, so the bridge surfaces quota problems post-mortem — and the pipeline templates carry spawn estimates (best case 6, worst case ~12 per feature run) so you can budget.

Testing

npm test   # 45 end-to-end cases, no LLMs involved

Boots a real hub on a scratch port and exercises the HTTP API, all 8 MCP tools, the dispatcher, permission/claim edge cases, watchdog reaping, loop-guard, concurrency (parallel claims), crash-safety (missing binaries), and the CLI as a subprocess.

FAQ

Does this violate any provider's terms? It uses only documented surfaces: MCP servers and official headless CLIs, each authenticated with your own accounts. It never proxies one model through another, trains on outputs, or works around rate limits.

Do both apps have to be open? No. Only the hub runs persistently. The receiving agent is spawned headless on demand and exits when done; the sender is whatever you're already working in (or the dashboard form).

How do I add an agent that isn't Claude or Antigravity? Usually zero code: the command adapter + an args template. Bespoke behavior = one adapter file implementing spawn + mcpConfigSnippet.

What if two agents delegate to each other forever? Every task carries a delegation depth; the dispatcher refuses past maxDepth (default 6), and pipeline templates cap their debate/review loops.

Prior art & positioning

One-way bridges that expose agy as a tool inside Claude Code exist (agy-bridge, claude-to-agy), and AWS Labs CAO orchestrates CLIs under a tmux supervisor–worker hierarchy. ekip occupies the gap: symmetric peer delegation + a shared blackboard, per-project, npm-light.

License

MIT