io.github.Odrin/rhizome-mcp

rhizome-mcp is a local-first MCP server for task tracking and coordination of autonomous AI coding agents. It gives agents from different products — Claude Code, Codex, GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and any other MCP-compatible client — a shared, durable view of project work: one static Go binary, one SQLite database per project, no accounts, no Docker, no network dependency.

Why

AI coding agents are concurrent, context-limited, and interruptible. A TODO.md or a single chat context doesn't survive that. rhizome-mcp is built around those failure modes:

• Crash-safe claiming. Issues are claimed atomically with renewable leases. in_progress is never a stored status — it is derived from an active lease, so a vanished agent can't lock an issue forever. When the lease expires, the issue becomes claimable again. A partial unique index guarantees at most one active attempt per issue at the database level.
• Durable project memory. Checkpoints with next steps, supersedable decision records, append-only event history, and FTS5 full-text search across issues, comments, decisions, and notes. A fresh session resumes from the last checkpoint instead of re-deriving state.
• Token-efficient by contract. Compact list projections (a 100-issue page stays under 64 KB — enforced by an integration test), graph nodes that exclude free-text bodies at the SQL layer, snippet-only search, delta sync via event IDs, and a bounded single-call work-context package.
• Planning and dependency graphs. Cycle-checked blocks relations, epics, claimable entry-point highlighting, and atomic batch planning (up to 50 issues, 100 relations, and 20 decisions in one all-or-nothing transaction).
• Review workflow. Review requests pin an exact issue version and event position; stale targets are superseded automatically, so approving changed code is impossible.
• Concurrency discipline throughout. Optimistic versioning on mutations, replay-safe idempotency keys, stable machine-actionable error codes.
• Human observability without a server. rhizome-mcp board prints live leases, blockers, and the review queue, or writes a self-contained HTML snapshot; the CLI reads everything as tables, JSON, Markdown, or Mermaid.

Use it when several agent sessions (or several agent products) work the same repository over time and you need handoffs, parallel work, and recovery after crashes or context limits.

Skip it if you need a hosted multi-user tracker with auth, permissions, and a web UI — this is a local single-developer tool by design.

Quick start

Install and run

Choose the approach that matches your workflow:

Zero-install trial via npm

Try rhizome-mcp immediately with no separate binary install, no Go toolchain:

npx rhizome-mcp serve

Works with any MCP client. See packages/npm/README.md for platform coverage. Great for quick evaluation.

VS Code

Install

... View full README on GitHub