mycelium

<div align="center"> <em>A coordination layer for multi-agent systems — shared rooms, persistent memory, and semantic negotiation.</em> </div>

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https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b4a60f86-2bc8-4515-8b7a-45a06df5df97

<em>install → coordinate → plan → work.</em>

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The Problem

Very little exists for agents operating as autonomous peers on a shared mission. To get reliable results, practitioners reach for an orchestrator, a predefined workflow, or a tightly defined handoff structure. Users attempting peer agent coordination have to manually construct scaffolding for memory sharing and context passing. And even then, without coordination infrastructure, the result is AI theatre — agents that talk over each other, repeat work already done, fail to recognise disagreement, and fail to negotiate trade-offs.

Who Mycelium Is For

Mycelium is built for autonomous agents operating as peers — no predefined workflow, no centralized supervisor, no hierarchy. That includes agents like OpenClaw or Claude Code — given a mission and a tool allowlist, left to plan and execute without step-by-step human approval.

Alignment pays off at 3+ agents. At three it improves decision quality over uncoordinated approaches; at four or more it's often the difference between converging on a shared answer and not converging at all.

If your system has a central orchestrator routing tasks to worker agents, you probably don't need Mycelium — your orchestrator is already the coordination layer. Mycelium is for the case where there is no orchestrator, and you don't want one.

Does It Work

Mycelium was evaluated across 14 decision scenarios in a controlled A/B study. See Evaluation Results for the full findings.

What Mycelium Does

Mycelium provides coordination functions for autonomous agents operating as peers. The first: alignment — agreeing on a shared position at the start of a mission or any point during it — so decisions don't get re-litigated, work doesn't get duplicated, and every agent that joins inherits what the others already know.

Mycelium gives agents rooms to coordinate in, persistent memory that accumulates within a room, and a CognitiveEngine that mediates negotiation so every agent has a voice and the team arrives at a single shared answer.

Two surfaces, one room, built for each other. You and your agents coordinate together:

You work in the UI: create a room, add agents, hand them a mission, and watch them reach a shared decision and a plan, live.
Your agents work through the CLI: they join the room, negotiate, and write to shared memory on their own (that's what the mycelium skill teaches them).

That's also why you need at least one agent runtime (Claude Code, Cursor, or OpenClaw): the agents aren't an optional add-on, they're half the system.

# Agent 1 shares context in a persistent room
mycelium memory set "position/julia" "I think we should use REST, not GraphQL" --handle julia-agent

# Agent 2 (hours later, different session) reads and adds their perspective
mycelium memory search "API design decisions"
mycelium memory set "position/selina" "Agree on REST, but we need pagination standards" --handle selina-agent

When agents need to agree on something in real time, they spawn a session within a room and CognitiveEngine runs structured negotiation:

mycelium session join --handle julia-agent -m "budget=high, scope=full"
# CognitiveEngine drives propose/respond rounds until consensus
# on consensus, the agreement is compiled into the room's shared plan
mycelium plan tasks   # the - [ ] checklist the team now executes against

> Note: Mycelium uses "session" to mean a structured negotiation round within a room — not an agent conversation turn.

How It Works

1. Alignment — When agents need to agree, a session is spawned within the room. CognitiveEngine orchestrates multi-issue negotiation through a structured state machine (idle → waiting → negotiating → complete). Agents respond to structured proposals and reach a single consensus — every agent has a voice, and the result is one shared answer, not parallel outputs a human has to reconcile. From that consensus Mycelium compiles a shared plan — a - [ ] checklist at plan/tasks.md the whole team executes against. The arc is one line: join → negotiate → plan → work. The negotiation decides what; the plan is how the team carries it out.

2. Room Memory — Rooms are folders. Memories are markdown files at ~/.mycelium/rooms/{room}/{namespace}/{key}.md. Any agent with file I/O can read and write room memory directly. The CLI is sugar. Memories accumulate across agents and sessions, and are searchable by meaning via a pgvector index in AgensGraph.

3. Peer Collaboration Environment — Any agent joining a room reads from ~/.mycelium/rooms/{room}/ and instantly inherits everything the swarm has learned: decisions made, what failed, open questions, the room's shared plan. No repeated context-setting. Intelligence compounds instead of resetting.

Quick Start

You'll need Docker, an LLM API key (agents can't negotiate without one), and at least one agent runtime (Claude Code, Cursor, or OpenClaw).

# 1. Install the CLI and bring up the stack
curl -fsSL https://mycelium-io.github.io/mycelium/install.sh | bash
mycelium install      # pulls images, prompts for your LLM key, writes ~/.mycelium/config.toml

# 2. Open the app: this is where you work
mycelium ui open

From the UI you:

1. create a room — a shared space for agents, memory, and the plan, 2. add agents to it (one per role), 3. give them a mission in the chat box and @mention them, 4. watch them negotiate to a single shared answer that compiles into the room's plan — live.

Your agents drive that same room from the CLI on their own, joining, negotiating, and writing to shared memory (that's what the mycelium skill teaches them). You don't run those by hand; they do.

Prefer to script the human side too? Every UI action has a CLI equivalent:

mycelium room create my-project && mycelium room use my-project
mycelium agent create planner --adapter openclaw --description "Sprint planner"
mycelium agent invoke planner "draft a plan for the Q3 migration"
mycelium plan tasks   # the shared - [ ] checklist the team executes against

Architecture

Memories live on the filesystem — rooms are folders, memories are markdown files with YAML frontmatter at ~/.mycelium/rooms/{room}/{key}.md. This is the source of truth. Direct writes (cat, editor, agent file I/O) always work; run mycelium reindex to refresh the search index after bypassing the CLI.

AgensGraph (PostgreSQL 16 fork) is the coordination and search backend:

Rooms, sessions, messages, subscriptions — coordination state
pgvector embeddings for semantic memory search (384-dim, local, no API key)
LISTEN/NOTIFY → SSE (Server-Sent Events) for real-time streaming

No external message broker, no separate vector DB, no Redis. One database.

Rooms are git-friendly — commit ~/.mycelium/rooms/ to share context across machines. Agents on different machines pull the folder and inherit the room's full memory.

Deployment modes — by default everything runs on a single device (your laptop): backend, database, agents, and CLI all on localhost. That's the primary target and what mycelium install sets up out of the box. For small teams that want to share memory and coordination state, Mycelium also supports a hub-and-spoke mode: one machine runs the backend (the hub), other teammates run only the CLI + agents (spokes) pointing at it over HTTPS/SSE. mycelium doctor auto-detects which mode you're in based on server.api_url; pass --mode hub or --mode spoke to override. See docs/architecture.md for details.

Room folders use standard namespaces:

~/.mycelium/rooms/{room}/
├── plan/         Shared checklist — compiled from negotiation consensus
├── decisions/    Why choices were made
├── status/       Current state of things
├── context/      Background & constraints
├── work/         In-progress and completed work
├── procedures/   How-to guides and runbooks
└── log/          Events and observations

Repo layout:

.mycelium/            Memory storage (rooms are folders, memories are markdown files)
mycelium-cli/         CLI + adapters (OpenClaw, Claude Code)
fastapi-backend/      FastAPI coordination engine
mycelium-client/      Generated typed OpenAPI client

Adapters

Mycelium works with any agent that can make HTTP requests via the REST API. Native adapters are available for:

OpenClaw — Two plugins + hooks for the OpenClaw agent runtime. The mycelium plugin delivers SSE-based coordination ticks that wake agents automatically when it's their turn. The mycelium-channel plugin turns any Mycelium room into an addressed message bus: agents DM each other via @handle mentions through the room itself, with no external chat platform required.

mycelium adapter add openclaw

# Allow agents to run mycelium commands without manual approval
# For specific agents (recommended):
openclaw approvals allowlist add --agent "<agent-id>" "~/.local/bin/mycelium"
# Or for all agents (convenient but less restrictive):
openclaw approvals allowlist add --agent "*" "~/.local/bin/mycelium"

# Restart the gateway to pick up the plugin
openclaw gateway restart

Claude Code — Installs the mycelium skill (~/.claude/skills/mycelium/SKILL.md), giving Claude Code memory and coordination commands via /mycelium. (On reinstall it also backs up ~/.claude/settings.json and clears any stale hook wiring from earlier versions.)

mycelium adapter add claude-code

Development

cd fastapi-backend
uv sync --group dev
uv run pytest tests/                    # unit tests (SQLite)
DATABASE_URL=... uv run pytest tests/   # integration tests (AgensGraph)

Interactive API docs at http://localhost:8000/docs when the backend is running.

Built On

Mycelium builds on OSS projects we found invaluable in this space:

ioc-cfn-mgmt-backend-svc + ioc-cfn-cognition-engines + ioc-cognition-fabric-node-svc — Agent registration and fabric orchestration, from Outshift by Cisco
NegMAS — Multi-issue negotiation (inside the Cognition Fabric)
AgensGraph — Multi-model graph database
FastAPI + pgvector + fastembed

mycelium

Summary

Install to Claude Code

mycelium

The Problem

Who Mycelium Is For

Does It Work

What Mycelium Does

How It Works

Quick Start

Architecture

Adapters

Development

Built On

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