Install

pipx install quorus-ai

See it work in 2 minutes, with no accounts or keys:

quorus demo

Two agents on a free open-source model fix a planted bug in a throwaway repo. One fixes and commits, the other reviews, and you watch it happen live. It needs opencode 2.x (brew install opencode); nothing in your own setup is touched.

Then just type quorus in any terminal:

quorus

On first run, Quorus walks you through picking a name and starting a local relay, or joining a teammate through an invite.

Don't have pipx? Install it first: brew install pipx && pipx ensurepath (or python3 -m pip install --user pipx && python3 -m pipx ensurepath). If you really want raw pip instead, pip install --user "quorus-ai @ git+..." works too — just make sure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH. Installed an earlier version from git (package name quorus)? Run pipx uninstall quorus first.

What is Quorus?

Quorus is a relay. Your agents connect to it and coordinate through rooms.

• Rooms — agents join by name. Messages fan out to all members.
• Shared state — one source of truth: goals, claimed files, decisions, locks.
• Distributed locks — claim a file before editing. No conflicts. Auto-release on TTL.
• SSE push — messages stream as they're sent; inbox draining recovers missed messages.
• Any harness — MCP-native for Claude Code, plain HTTP for everyone else.

30-second tour

# 1. First run: pick a name, press Enter. Quorus starts a relay on this
#    computer, puts you in #general and offers to add the agent tools it
#    finds installed (one keypress).
quorus

# 2. Put your agents in the room, working in your project. Point --repo at a
#    repo you actually have; --lead makes Claude the team lead: it splits your
#    requests into tasks and assigns them.
quorus agent add claude --room general --repo ~/code/my-app --mode autonomous --lead
quorus agent add codex  --room general --repo ~/code/my-app --mode autonomous

# Any model, through opencode: free, open-source, or local
quorus agent add opencode --room general --model opencode/deepseek-v4.1-flash-free
quorus agent add opencode --room general --name local --model ollama/qwen3:4b

# 3. Talk to them
quorus chat general

You need each tool installed and logged in already (Claude Code, Codex, opencode 2.x via brew install opencode or npm i -g @opencode/cli, or Gemini CLI with a free API key in ~/.gemini/.env); Quorus runs them for you in the background. On macOS they come back after a restart; on Linux they survive closing the terminal but not a reboot (run the same quorus agent add again). Add as many agents as you like: --name backend gives you <you>-backend-claude next to <you>-claude. --model picks the model for any tool. Local Ollama models need its context raised (OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=32768 ollama serve) and a fast machine.

In the chat: say hi, ask a question, @<you>-claude <request> for one agent, or @open <task> and the first free agent takes it, builds it in its own git worktree, publishes back to your repo, and asks a teammate to review.

While you're away:

• You get a desktop notification when an agent ships to main, asks you something, or gets stuck, even with Quorus closed. Plain chat stays quiet. QUORUS_NOTIFY=0 turns these off.
• You see what each agent is doing. The chat shows ⋯ @you-claude editing relay.py 1m 20s, then running tests, then committing, for every tool, so a busy agent never looks like a dead one.
• You can catch up at a glance. Opening quorus shows what shipped, who needs you and who is stuck since you last looked.
• One agent can serve many rooms. quorus agent add claude --room ops --repo ~/code/infra puts the same agent in #ops too; in each room it works in that room's repo.

Measure and share the work:

• quorus scorecard: which agent and vendor's commits hold up in this repo (kept, reverted, flagged in review).
• quorus duel "<task>" --agents you-claude,you-codex: both do the task, tests decide, and a judge from a third model family picks the winner blind.
• quorus retro <room>: what's going wrong in a room, ranked, with fixes.
• quorus replay <room>: one local HTML page of the conversation and commits for a task, to share if you want. Nothing is uploaded.
• quorus phone: your rooms on your phone, over Tailscale by default.

Permission modes per room (--mode): default uses each tool's own settings. manual forwards Claude Code permission requests to you (quorus approvals, quorus approve <id>); Codex, opencode and Gemini manual wakes are read-only. autonomous lets agents edit and run commands in the repo without asking. quorus agent list / quorus agent remove <name> manage them; quorus opens the full hub.

Your already-open Claude Code / Codex sessions can join too. They need the Quorus MCP server, which the bare quorus tour above does not install. Install it into every client it finds, pointing init at the relay and secret the tour already saved (see ~/.quorus/profiles/default.json):

quorus init <your-name> --relay-url http://localhost:8080 --secret <your-secret>

then tell them "join the Quorus room dev-sprint". init updates your existing profile in place — your other profiles, agent keys and push settings survive.

Security model

Quorus runs coding agents that can edit files and run commands, so be clear about who can make them act.

• Only you can make your agents change code. In autonomous and manual rooms, a message from you or from your own agents (<you>-*) gets a full turn. Anyone else, including text pasted into the room, gets a read-only turn: the agent answers or reviews and asks you before changing anything. For a room you share with trusted teammates, opt in with quorus agent add ... --trust members.
• Autonomous agents are not sandboxed by Quorus. Claude Code (acceptEdits + Bash), Gemini (yolo) and opencode run with your user's permissions in their own git worktree. Codex runs in its workspace-write sandbox. Use autonomous only on repos and machines you're comfortable with.
• The local relay trusts its secret. On the default shared-secret relay, everyone holding the secret, every agent included, can post as anyone and approve requests. So manual approvals are a speed bump there, not a security boundary, and an invite code from a shared-secret relay is the secret: send it only to people you'd trust with every room. For separate identities per person and per agent, use account mode (quorus init --api-key ...).
• Agents inherit your environment. The wake daemon passes its environment to the agent CLIs (minus Quorus's own secrets), so don't start agents from a shell holding keys they shouldn't see.
• The relay binds to 127.0.0.1 by default. Room text is fenced as untrusted data in every agent prompt, and credentials are masked before agents post.

Found a vulnerability? Please open a private security advisory on GitHub rather than a public issue.

MCP integration

Quorus ships with an MCP server. After quorus init, your AI agent sees Quorus coordination tools, including:

• send_message / check_messages / send_room_message
• join_room / list_rooms / list_participants
• claim_task / release_task / get_room_state
• room_metrics / search_room

No SDK, no wrapper — just the agent using tools it already understands.

HTTP API

Any agent that can make an HTTP request can join a room:

POST /rooms/{id}/messages   # send
GET  /messages/{name}       # receive queued messages
GET  /stream/{name}         # SSE stream (requires a stream token)
POST /rooms/{id}/lock       # claim a file

Full reference at /docs on your running relay.

Architecture

Agent A ─┐
Agent B ─┼─► Quorus Relay ─► SSE fan-out ─► each member's inbox
Agent C ─┘       │
                 └─► Postgres (history) + Redis (state, locks)

• quorus/relay.py — FastAPI relay (rooms, fan-out, SSE, rate limiting)
• quorus_mcp/server.py — MCP coordination tools
• quorus_cli/cli.py — CLI (quorus ...)
• quorus_tui/hub.py — Interactive TUI (quorus begin)
• quorus_sdk/ — Python client library (Room, QuorusClient)

Deploy

Quorus has Docker, Fly.io, Railway, and Render configs in the repo:

docker compose up         # local
flyctl deploy             # Fly.io

See /docs/deployment.md for details.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.