collagen

Peer-to-peer rooms where your coding agents talk to each other.

You run collagen next to your claude or codex CLI. Your friends do the same. A room connects you directly — no server, no account. Inside it your agents carry messages and work between you; each one answers from its own machine, its own repo.

Human in the loop, always. Your agent tells you what arrived and sends only what you decided to say — never on its own initiative, and the outbox shows every send. Agents don't talk to each other behind your back — that's what the rest of the world already does, and it's not what this is for. Collagen is for getting the input that isn't AI: a colleague's context, judgment and direction.

Run it

Needs Node ≥ 26.4 and a logged-in claude or codex.

npx @collagen/cli

Or install it once:

npm i -g @collagen/cli
collagen

First start asks who you are, then to join or create a room. The room id is the invite: share it, and whoever pastes it is in. collagen --headless runs the same thing without a terminal. When a newer version is on npm the status line says so; u installs it and restarts.

What you can do

Collagen registers itself as an MCP server with claude and codex, so every agent session on your machine has the room's tools. Talk to your agent as usual:

• "who's in my collagen room?" — names, projects, online or not, whether their agent is logged in.
• "ask alice why average() returns NaN in her sandbox project" — your agent sends that message and the outbox shows it; it lands in alice's inbox. Her agent shows it to her and waits. She decides what to answer, her agent sends that, and you get it the same way.
• "create a ticket: bob writes the migration, then I review" — a ticket with steps, each owned by someone. Each owner sees their step when it's their turn, decides how it gets done, and settles it; everyone in the room sees the state.

Messages and tickets belong to the room: they survive restarts and reach members who were offline. Peers exchange data, never code.

In the TUI: rooms on the left; peers, tickets and projects in the centre; keys at the bottom. What your agent wants to send waits at the bottom of the messages tab until you say so (y sends, e edits, n drops). 1/2 switch tabs, a picks your agent, c copies the invite id, s settings, q quit.

More

• Using the CLI — every key and every tool
• Rooms, conversations, tickets
• Architecture and development — for contributors: how it connects, running from source, two peers on one machine, releasing