hubd

The project tracker for teams of humans and AI agents — in plain files.

You run two, three, five agent sessions — different tools, different vendors — across your projects. Each one is brilliant, and each one has no idea the others exist. You are the coordination layer: copy-pasting context, re-explaining state, discovering on Monday what an agent did on Friday.

hubd replaces you in that job with the most boring technology available: plain files. A shared headquarters for your whole team — agents and humans: a journal of what everyone did, task queues every agent can wait on, cross-project tasks, and a read-only kanban to watch it all. All markdown and JSONL, in a folder you own.

Not a runner. Orchestrators launch your coding agents and stream their output — that's making coding faster. hubd manages the work: which projects, what's next, who does it and when, what already happened. An orchestrator can run your agents; hubd runs your projects. They compose.

The Unix pair

• hubd — the daemon: an MCP server (stdio, JSON-RPC 2.0) that agents talk to.
• hub — the CLI: the same data for humans, no LLM required.

Like sshd and ssh. The daemon serves agents; the CLI serves you.

Quick start

Option A — start a company (GitHub template). Use the "Use this template" button on the hubd-company/ directory — or clone and copy that folder into an existing private repo. You get a ready org structure: constitution (AGENTS.md), role onboardings, project cards, queues, recipes. Hiring an agent = a fresh session reads a role file. This template is NOT included in the npm package; it comes from the repo.

Option B — add the binaries to what you have:

npm i -g @bzdos/hubd   # installs both binaries: hubd (MCP server) + hub (CLI)
hub init             # scaffold a team folder: AGENTS.md, INBOX.md, queues/
hub doctor           # check hub base, team root, locks and queues
hub status           # every project at a glance
hub brief            # morning brief: tasks, journal, locks
hub serve            # read-only kanban on localhost
# one-off, without install: npx -p @bzdos/hubd hub status

The npm package ships: hub/ (binaries + lib), prompts/, README.md, LICENSE, and HARVEST.md. It does NOT include hubd-company/.

Connect your agent (any MCP client):

claude mcp add --scope user hubd -- npx -y @bzdos/hubd

No MCP? No problem — every model that can read and write files can join: paste the matching block from prompts/ (Claude Code, Cursor, or any no-MCP agent) and it knows the protocol.

Running it for a team? hubd also speaks MCP over HTTP — one shared hub all your agents point at, token-gated and multi-tenant. See self-hosting.

Updating, and where your data lives

hubd is a tool, like git or node: you install the code, and your data is a folder you own. They are two separate things — and that is the whole point.

• Code — the npm package. Update like any global CLI: npm i -g @bzdos/hubd@latest (or run one-off with npx -y @bzdos/hubd). A new version ships the engine; it never touches your data.
• Data — HUBD_DIR (default ~/.hubd): plain markdown + JSONL, yours to keep.
• Several machines? Make HUBD_DIR a git repo and sync it however you like — a private remote over SSH works, no GitHub needed. Each machine installs the code from npm; your data travels in your own git. Two separate tracks: code from the package, data in your folder. Upgrading the code never migrates or deletes your data — the event logs are append-only and richer than any one version's schema.

How it works

• Journal (INBOX.md) — append-only team log. Every agent reads it on wake-up, writes to it on handoff. You read it with your eyes.
• Queues — per-role message queues. Send work; an agent blocks on wait until something arrives, then goes back to waiting. No polling you, no prodding them. A queue has one live consumer — run a single waiting session per role.
• Projects & tasks — one card per project; cross-project tasks with owners (agent or human) and claims as soft locks, so two agents don't clobber each other.
• Kanban (read-only) — cards move because agents move them. The only button is ⚙ Rules, and it opens AGENTS.md. You don't manage the agents — you manage the rules.
• Harvest — one pasted prompt turns any working dialog into project digests, tasks and logged decisions. See HARVEST.md.
• MCP + files, two levels of compatibility — smart clients connect over MCP; everything else uses the files directly. If hubd is down, your data is still just markdown.

Principles (violating these = not this product)

Files first. Dumb server, smart agents — no AI inside: hubd stores and serves, intelligence comes from your agents. Human-readable everything. Zero dependencies. Read-only for the human; write access flows through rules. Graceful degradation: no MCP → files; no hubd → files still readable as-is — in any editor, grep, or a Markdown app like Obsidian. See Reading your hub with any tool.

What hubd is not

Not an orchestrator (doesn't launch agents or stream output). Not vector memory (the journal stores facts you can read, not embeddings). Not a Jira for humans (the human here is a spectator and a legislator, not an assignee). Not another chat (talk to hubd through your agent; hands — CLI; eyes — kanban).

Built by the team it coordinates

hubd's own development runs through hubd: one human and a few agents on models from different vendors, coordinating through nothing but the files above. It's our daily dogfood — and the most honest illustration we can offer of the protocol under real use, including the evening a tooling failure forced everything back to plain files and the work simply kept moving. One team's story, lightly anonymized and self-reported, not a benchmark: the case study.

The human's main job was editing the rules.

Pricing

The core is MIT, forever. Personal use is free, forever. If a hosted team plan ever exists, the line is simple: agents are free, humans are billed.

Roadmap

Already shipped: multi-machine sync (per-host append-only logs, conflict-free) and remote access over HTTP (token-gated, multi-tenant) — see self-hosting.

Next (v0.2) — a graph/semantic layer: [[project]] / #task / @role links the tools resolve, task kinds with their own lifecycles (a communicative task knows it's waiting on a reply), and hub next to surface your top unblocked task. Later: an end-to-end remote mode (the server never reads your work) and a gateway that proxies your personal MCP servers. The file format is the stable contract; everything else is negotiable.

License

MIT.