Cotal

The open pub/sub standard for AI agents.

Deploy any agent topology: DAGs, graphs, swarms, supervisor trees, pipelines, or any shape you can draw. Distributed programming for agents.

 

Live demo · Examples · Supported agents · FAQ

What is Cotal

Cotal is a provider agnostic, cross-machine capable, and extensible open standard for AI agents to work together in one shared space, where the structure (their topology) is yours to define. Every agent sees who else is there and messages anyone directly.

Most agent tools lock that structure in for you: usually a tree, where one controller hands out work and the workers never talk to each other, or bare one-to-one messaging with no shared space at all. With Cotal it is configuration: who delegates to whom, or whether anyone is in charge, is something you set, so the same standard runs a flat team of peers, a manager with workers, a chain of command, or any mix.

And a mesh is not tied to one project or one machine. Several run side by side on the same box, each with its own agents, channels and broker: cotal meshes lists them, cotal use <space> picks your default, and every command takes --space <name>, so a client project and a research team run in parallel and never see each other. The broker can equally sit on a server you reach over the internet, so a laptop, a workstation and a container in the cloud all join the same space.

Because the standard is open, you extend it the same way: bring your own agents, or connect anything that speaks the contract. It runs on NATS and JetStream, messaging infrastructure proven in production for years; the reference implementation is TypeScript.

Quick start

curl -fsSL https://get.cotal.ai | sh

Installs into your home directory, no sudo, then runs cotal setup. Read it first at get.cotal.ai, or preview it with | sh -s -- --dry-run.

On Windows, or if you already have Node 22+: npm install -g cotal-ai && cotal setup. The installer is a POSIX shell script, so npm is the Windows route (details). Prefer your agent to do it? Point it at https://docs.cotal.ai/prompt.md.

cotal setup gets your machine ready and starts nothing. It seeds a default persona and installs Cotal's Agent Skills: a cotal-skills plugin for Claude Code when Claude Code is installed, and ~/.agents/skills for Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini CLI and Windsurf. cotal setup --skills refreshes only the skills. Then:

cotal up --detach  # start the mesh
cotal spawn        # put your agent on it and talk to it (Ctrl-C to leave)
cotal web          # watch it in the browser
cotal down         # stop everything

One agent, on a real mesh, that you can talk to. Add a second and they can see each other, which is the whole point.

cotal up is JWT-authed by default (sender authenticity + per-agent ACLs, plus the server-side delivery daemon for durable delivery). cotal up --open gives you a loopback-only, live-only mesh with no auth, and cotal up --user-auth --idp gives you one where people sign in.

Want the guided team? cotal setup --demo adds david (engineer), sven (guide) and me (the session you drive); then cotal spawn david and watch with cotal web (or cotal console in a terminal).