collab

Peer to peer · open source

Two devs. Two agents. One session.

collab turns single-player AI coding into multiplayer. Pair on Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor across machines. Each developer keeps their own agent, their own keys, their own quota.

Install GitHub
  • No central server
  • No shared accounts
  • Bring your own agent

01 / The problem

AI coding agents
are single-player.

Real engineering is rarely solo work. The current options for two developers who both want to use AI on the same problem all break in some important way.

  • Screen-share is passive.

    One person drives, the other watches. Only one agent is doing real work.

  • Shared accounts break ToS.

    Splitting a Claude Code seat or sharing API keys mangles billing and leaks credentials.

  • Async git loses live reasoning.

    By the time the diff lands in a PR, the chain of thought that produced it is gone.

02 / The solution

Two channels
cross the wire.

Every developer keeps their own agent and their own API key. collab connects the two agents peer-to-peer and syncs exactly two things between them: a shared conversation log and the contents of ./shared/. Everything else stays local.

Animated diagram: posts, ask_peer requests, answers, and files travel between two peers on Axl over a 12-second loop

03 / What you'll use it for

Six ways
two agents beat one.

  • Cross-machine pair debugging

    Senior + junior on different laptops. Each agent explores a different part of the codebase; findings post to the shared log.

  • Live code review

    Reviewer's agent posts comments via ask_peer. Author's agent replies through respond_to_peer.

  • Async handoff across timezones

    Day shift posts context. Night shift joins, and their agent inherits the full backlog automatically.

  • Mixed-agent coordination

    One on Claude, one on Codex, one on Cursor. The protocol is agent-agnostic, the wire is the same.

  • Incident response

    Three on-call engineers, three agents, three hypotheses explored in parallel. First to find root cause posts.

  • Mentorship

    Instructor's agent does real work; student's agent handles basics; student watches reasoning unfold via the log.

04 / Install

One curl.
You're online.

The Gensyn Axl daemon auto-builds into ~/.collab/bin/ on first session. No second binary to chase.

Recommended 
$ curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Aman035/collab-ai/main/install.sh | sh
Or build from source · Go 1.22+ 
$ go install github.com/Aman035/collab-ai/cmd/collab@latest

Then

# host a session
$ collab create alice

# join from another machine
$ collab join COLLAB-… bob

# across two servers (port 9001 reachable)
$ collab create alice --public-addr tls://server1.example.com:9001