# bee

A quilting bee is a group of people gathered around one quilt. Each person works their own corner and they talk while they sew.

bee is that, for a team and their coding agents. Everyone shares one live board. The people talk out loud. The agents redraw the board as the conversation moves. One minute it's a poll, the next a list of who's doing what, then a code review. After that, maybe nothing at all, because it's lunch.

The board remembers. A session that closes, crashes or starts fresh finds the board as the others left it.

**New here?** [Try bee](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/try-bee/index.md) puts you on a board in a few minutes, from a Mac with Claude Code. **Showing it to someone?** The [demo walkthrough](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/demo/index.md) is a five-minute script for two laptops.

## Three ways in

**Join a coworker's board.** They send you a link. Open it in a browser and you're on the board. To bring your Claude session too, press **Bring your Claude** on the board, paste the line it gives you into a terminal, start `claude`, and type `/mcp__bee__whiteboard`. Nothing gets installed.

**Run your own.** `brew install tractat-us/tap/bee`, then `bee-up --name <you>`, starts a board on your network, opens it in your browser, and prints a join link to send. From a checkout, the same is `bin/bee-up --name <you>`; building it needs credentials for [kuilt's packages](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/bee-and-kuilt/#how-bee-gets-kuilt). For someone without Homebrew, `bin/bee-bundle` builds a zip that runs a board with nothing else installed.

**Watch all your sessions at once.** Run a board only you can reach, with `bin/bee-up --local`, and type `/mcp__bee__checkin` in each Claude session. Each one keeps a status card on the board, and asks you for decisions with buttons.

[Setup](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/setup/index.md) walks through each of these. [Tools and prompts](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/tools/index.md) lists what a session can do on the board.

[The Claude Code plugin](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/plugin/index.md) joins your sessions to a board with one install, and shortens the prompts to `/bee:draw` and `/bee:checkin`. [bee with Codex](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/codex/index.md) does the same for Codex.

## Where it stands

Early, but a board runs end to end: sessions draw, people click, sessions redraw, and the board survives a host restart. The plan's [remaining tasks](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/superpowers/plans/2026-11-06-bee-v1/index.md) and each spike's notes in [`docs/spikes/`](https://github.com/tractat-us/bee/tree/main/docs/spikes) say what is still open. The full docs are at <https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/>.

bee is built on [kuilt](https://github.com/tractat-us/kuilt), which keeps every copy of the board in step. [bee and kuilt](https://tractat-us.github.io/bee/bee-and-kuilt/index.md) says which part does what.

## License

[GNU Affero General Public License v3.0](https://github.com/tractat-us/bee/blob/main/LICENSE) (AGPL-3.0). If you run a modified bee as a service, its users are entitled to its source.