Coordination (the hive)

How parallel agents coordinate safely — the hive, the BeesBoard, cell claims, and cross-agent handoff.

When you run many agents on the same project at once, they need to coordinate without colliding — but for safety they run in isolated, egress-denied pods and can’t talk to each other directly. AgentBees provides a mediated coordination layer called the hive: every message flows pod → orchestrator → siblings, never pod-to-pod.

Everything a sibling agent produces is treated as untrusted data by the receiver. Agents are instructed never to follow instructions embedded in another agent’s messages — coordination carries information, not commands.

The hive tools

When coordination is enabled for your org, agents get a toolset (an MCP server):

Tool	What it’s for
hive_swarm	List active sibling tasks (id, role, branch). Call it first.
hive_broadcast / hive_ask / hive_reply / hive_inbox	Short mediated messages between siblings
beesboard_post / beesboard_read	The BeesBoard — a project blackboard for declared interfaces/contracts (e.g. module:auth.login) so dependents build against declared shapes
claim_cell / release_cell	Soft, advisory file/module claims (TTL’d, auto-expiring) so two agents don’t edit the same file
hive_conflicts	Read-only cross-branch conflict check
honeybox_search / honeybox_get	Search/fetch your org’s reusable skills (“HoneyBox”) — trusted org content

You can hint the agent to use these from the New Task form’s Agent coordination strip, which appends coordination guidance to your prompt.

Deterministic conflict detection

Beyond agent-to-agent chat, the orchestrator computes conflicts and diffs deterministically (no LLM): it fetches sibling task-<id> branches and runs git merge-tree to find conflicting paths, and git diff --numstat for pairwise diffs with an overlap list of files both branches touched. This powers the hive_conflicts tool and the optional Workspace Coordinator agent — a peer that never edits code; it only detects conflicts and tells each worker to fix its own side.

Pipelines vs coordination. A pipeline runs stages sequentially on one shared branch. Coordination is for parallel tasks that each have their own branch and need to avoid stepping on each other.

Cross-agent handoff

If a task pauses, you can resume it with a different agent CLI in place — on the same live pod and worktree, with no new workspace provisioned.

1. On a paused task, pick a resume agent

   The resume banner offers Claude / Codex / Gemini.

2. AgentBees builds a handoff brief

   A portable, agent-neutral summary — the task, the original request, where the previous agent left off, the uncommitted diff, and project notes.

3. The new agent takes over

   The pod swaps the CLI in place and the chosen agent continues from the brief.

Handoff is great when one model gets stuck — hand the exact same in-progress workspace to a different agent and let it continue, without losing any state.