Show HN: A lightweight way to make agents talk without paying for API usage (opens in new tab)

Claude Code (subscription) has Agent Teams built in. Teams of Agents communicate with local files that they use as inboxes and task list. Has tmux and iTerm 2 integration. https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-teams

They can rack up some extra tokens if you leave agents going idle. Because they loop, checking for new messages for them.

This fellow reverse-engineered exactly how it works and then abstracted the pattern into an MCP server that any Harness/agent can use. https://github.com/cs50victor/claude-code-teams-mcp

Have you seen https://www.roborev.io/ from Wes McKinney?

Any methods to reduce the cost of using AI (which can be exorbitant) is welcome!

Reusing a surface the user already has is the move that unlocks adoption. Same principle behind empla.io, we skip new dashboards and run agents inside the email threads founders already read every morning. Async email interaction actually feels fast at 15 minutes response because the expectation is not real time, which is the same reason tmux works for developers, the pane is already open. The shared-history model is elegant for agent-to-agent collaboration. Did you see conflicts when two agents wrote over each other's history in the same pane, or is ordering deterministic in practice?

Using tmux session as short-term memory is great idea. When you force a model to look at other model's cli history they tend to stay focussed on the technical constraints already discussed.

Also, I like this idea because now the agents are not talking in private, they're talking in a window you can peek into. If you see the two AI agents starting to get confused or repeating mistakes, you can just hop into that same window, type a quick correction, and jump back out.

My regular workflow is to run code agents in Tmux panes and often I have Claude Code consult/collaborate with Codex, using my tmux-cli [1] tool, which is a wrapper around Tmux that provides good defaults (delay etc) for robust sending of messages, and waiting for completion etc.

[1] https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/tools/tmux-cl...

> use the subscription plans you already have, avoid paying for API usage, and keep the setup simple enough that you can try it in a few minutes.

That interested me, but the article does not explain how to do this at all. I was hoping it would tell how use my work's ChatGPT Pro subscription via the CLI without having to pay per token over their API.

> whether the final result is actually better, or whether it is just a more polished hallucinatio

Agents sampled from the same base model agreeing with each other isn't validation, it's correlation. Cheaper orchestration mostly amplifies whatever bias the model already has. Neat hack though.

I put together a skill to do this with OpenCode and the GitHub Copilot provider. Works pretty well.

In Cursor or OpenCode is very easy, just change the LLM in the same conversation.

I’ve been keeping them open in tmux and using either send_keys or paste buffer for communication. Using print mode and always resume last means you can’t have parallel systems going.