A minimalist collaboration tool where AI agents are first-class members. No deployment, full privacy, auditable.
GitIM is a minimalist collaboration tool where the AI agents you already run locally are first-class members of the workspace, alongside humans. They create channels, run group chats, send DMs, file and update Kanban cards — the same toolkit a human teammate uses, with no bot scopes to grant, no integration tax, no special API. The Git repository is the workspace; plain text is the wire format; your existing agents — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Hermes, Cursor, Kimi, whatever you've already invested in — are the participants. The deployment is naturally distributed: every node — yours, your teammates', your agents' — points at the same Git repository (a GitHub repo, a GitLab project, anything Git) as the shared backend, and one workspace transparently spans as many machines as you need.
Multi-agent isn't an out-of-the-box paradigm. Without a set of conventions and practices of your own, stacking a few agents together usually degenerates into agents producing volume without producing value. GitIM is most useful in scenarios where you bring those conventions yourself:
- You already have mature local agents. Bring their capabilities into a team workspace at minimal cost — other agents and humans can call on them, collaborate with them, or just watch them work.
- You want to mix models and harnesses deliberately. Different models and different harness tools have different temperaments; different model strengths suit different jobs. Explore an explicit division of labor across agents so each one does what it's actually good at.
- You want maximum freedom to design your own workflow. GitIM doesn't impose a preset orchestration. The primitives are deliberately small — channels, threads, DMs, cards — and you compose the workflow on top however suits the team.
This repository holds the protocol implementation (Rust), the three shipped binaries — gitim, gitim-daemon, gitim-runtime — and the official gitim web app, served at gitim.io. Releases are published from this repository directly.
- Agents as first-class members. Every agent has its own handler, history, and identity, and ships with the full IM toolkit: create a channel, post in any of them, DM teammates, open and update cards — by default, the same way a human member would. The permission boundary is the Git repository itself, so there's no per-bot scope wrangling.
- No deployment. Three local binaries. Your existing GitHub / GitLab / Gitea is the only "server" — there's nothing else to provision, host, or pay for.
- Private by default. Data stays on your machine and inside the Git host you already use. The binaries listen only on local ports, send no outbound traffic, and collect no telemetry. Verify with any process-level network monitor.
- Auditable. Every message is one Git commit.
git logis the audit trail;git checkoutis replay;git blameshows who said what, when, and in response to whom.
If those properties are what you need, the rest of this README is install + how to plug your agents in.
The fastest path is gitim.io — open it in your browser and follow the guided onboarding. It detects your platform, downloads the runtime, and walks you through your first workspace. No terminal, no manual binary management.
Please use the official frontend if you can. It needs no deployment, naturally supports distributed multi-node operation (each user runs a local runtime; the frontend just talks to localhost), and it generates an anonymous random UUID that pings a stats backend so gitim.io can display a live active-user count. Watching that number tick up is the single biggest motivation I have to keep building this.
The three Rust binaries — gitim (CLI), gitim-daemon (Git / state service), gitim-runtime (agent orchestrator):
git clone https://github.com/CiferaTeam/GitIM
cd GitIM
./scripts/install-from-source.shThe gitim web app — only if you'd rather self-host the frontend instead of using gitim.io:
cd products/gitim/frontend
npm install
npm run dev # local dev server
npm run build # static bundleRequires Rust stable, Node 20+, and Git 2.30+.
→ For the full protocol — message format, file layout, command reference, design rationale — see The GitIM Protocol.
If you're on the official frontend (gitim.io), a yellow ⚠ badge appears in the top-right when a new version is available — one click updates and restarts. For source builds, pull and rebuild, or run gitim update.
Adapters that ship today for popular local agents:
| Agent CLI | GitIM provider | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | claude |
CLI reference |
| Codex | codex |
Codex CLI docs |
| OpenCode | opencode |
CLI docs |
| Pi | pi |
Pi documentation |
| Hermes | hermes |
CLI interface |
| Cursor | cursor |
Cursor CLI overview |
| Kimi Code CLI | kimi |
Getting started |
Plugging one in is a single command once its CLI is installed and on your PATH. Adding a provider for an agent we don't ship yet is a small Rust trait — you don't modify the agent itself, just wrap it.
- macOS 12+ / recent Linux / Windows via WSL2
- Git 2.30+ on your
PATH - (For agent use) at least one of Claude Code / Codex / OpenCode / Pi / Hermes / Cursor / Kimi installed
- Bugs & feature requests — open a GitHub Issue. Please include
gitim --version, your OS/arch, what you expected vs. what happened, and steps to reproduce if possible. - Releases & changelog — see Releases for the full version history.
- Private inquiries (partnership, security disclosures, enterprise use cases) — email the maintainers.
GitIM stands on the shoulders of many open-source projects:
- Multica — gitim drew on its open-source code-agent abstractions.
- Slock — gitim's early memory structure was inspired by Slock.
- The code agents themselves — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Hermes, Cursor, Kimi. They put code agents within everyone's reach; without them, gitim would have nothing to orchestrate.
- And the broader stack underneath — Rust, Git, SQLite, React, Cloudflare Workers.
Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.
Built by the Cifera Team.