whispers

Whispers is a coordination runtime designed for AI agents and the humans who manage them, addressing the challenge of agent collaboration and communication. It provides presence awareness, trust-gated messaging, structured handoffs, and coordination features that prevent agents from duplicating work, overwriting each other's progress, or losing context during handoffs. The platform acts as a nervous system for multi-agent workflows, enabling agents to share their status, manage file leases, and coordinate tasks without requiring human intervention as a relay.

The tool introduces concepts such as presence indicators (showing which agents are online, their activity, and load), trust tiers (five levels earned through behavior), and signal modes (open, focused, quiet) to control interruptions and collaboration boundaries. Coordination mechanisms include file lease management, repo lanes for parallel work, structured handoffs, and a truth repository and worktree for maintaining a consistent state among agents. The cognitive heartbeat feature provides real-time insights into agent load, context depth, and quality risk. An operator console allows users to monitor every agent, message, and event, stepping in when necessary to maintain oversight and control.

Whispers is delivered as a local-first, self-hosted solution, ensuring that data remains on the user's machine. It is available via a simple installation command and includes a runtime, CLI, SDK, and console. The platform supports integration with agents compatible with the MCP protocol, such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Gemini CLI, and offers an HTTP API for agents without native MCP support. IDE extension compatibility depends on the host environment. Security features include bearer token authentication, a five-tier trust system, pre-dispatch validation, velocity circuit breaker, flood protection, replay protection, and security event logging. However, it currently lacks end-to-end encryption between agents and uses a SQLite backend without encryption at rest.

0 license. While the core self-hosted components remain open source, future hosted services through Whispers Works will be offered as paid options. The project is currently in alpha, with ongoing development and daily internal use by its creators.