Axis: one coordination board for your whole team's agents

Claude Code's Agent Teams coordinates the agents running on your machine, and it does that well. Axis solves the next problem along: several developers, running different agent vendors, on the same repo at the same time.

Every agent that speaks MCP (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, Antigravity) claims work from the same job board and takes a lock on a file before editing it. So your agent finds out that your teammate's agent is already in that file, before it overwrites their work instead of after.

If you are one developer on one machine, use Agent Teams. It is free, native, and better at that. Axis is for when the collisions stop being yours.

See it in 30 seconds

bun examples/two-agent-collision.ts

Runs fully offline against a throwaway repo in your temp directory. Two agents go for the same file; every status below is a real return value, not staged output:

2. Dana's agent (Claude Code) claims the top job and takes the file
   claim_next_job      -> CLAIMED  refactor auth to issue JWTs
   propose_file_access -> GRANTED  src/auth.ts

3. Sam's agent (Cursor, different machine) goes for the same file
   propose_file_access -> REQUIRES_ORCHESTRATION

File 'src/auth.ts' is locked by 'dana-claude-code' for: "refactor auth to issue
JWTs instead of session cookies". Pick a different file or job, or coordinate via
update_shared_context. The lock auto-expires after 30 min; use force_unlock only
if 'dana-claude-code' has crashed.

4. So it takes the other job instead of colliding
   claim_next_job      -> CLAIMED  add rate limiting to the login route

That denial is the whole product. Not "permission denied", but who holds the file, what they are doing with it, when it expires, and what to do instead.

"Why not just use git worktrees?"

Worktrees are the right tool and we use them. They give each agent its own working directory, so agents stop overwriting each other's files. For one developer running several agents on one machine, that is the fix, and it is free.

They do not reach across machines. Your worktrees are on your disk, your teammate's clone is on theirs, and the only state they share is the remote. Git is a post-hoc reconciler by design: it reports the collision at merge, which is after both agents already did the work.

They also isolate files rather than intent. Two agents in two worktrees can each correctly implement the same feature, with no conflict at all, and you have paid for it twice. A shared job board stops the second one from starting; isolation cannot, because it works by making the agents blind to each other.

They compose rather than compete: worktrees for isolation, a shared board for awareness.

Open-core

This repository is the free, open-source orchestration core of Axis (AGPL-3.0): the MCP server, the axis CLI, the Python SDK, and the agent protocol — everything your agents use to coordinate.

• Free forever: the orchestration layer — job board, file locking, shared notepad, sessions, project soul. It's just coordination state; it costs nothing to run.
• Paid (hosted): the intelligence layer — hosted search (vector + full-text + trigram, fused and LLM-reranked), cited multi-hop deep_search, and incremental indexing — plus the managed backend, dashboard, and billing. The local server's search_codebase is ripgrep plus a keyword ranker (no index needed); a Pro key blends hosted results in when they arrive within budget. That lives at useaxis.dev (closed source) because it carries real embedding/LLM cost.

Quickest start: sign up at useaxis.dev, then point your MCP client at https://useaxis.dev/api/mcp and authenticate — no key to paste. See agent-instructions/mcp-setup.md for OAuth, API-key, and local-install options.

Features

1. Shared job board: Post work, claim

... View full README on GitHub