Agent orchestration for Claude Code
swarmdo turns Claude Code into a coordinated multi-agent system — 60+ agent roles, hive-mind consensus, persistent vector memory, and a Postgres vector extension. Fully self-contained: every engine ships in the repo. Based on the original ruflo.
A real swarmdo pipeline: five named agents, coordinated over messages, sharing one memory.
What it does
swarmdo registers as an MCP server and wires agents, memory, and consensus into every session — with hooks that learn from what worked.
Hierarchical, mesh, ring, star, or hybrid topologies with anti-drift defaults. Named agents coordinate over real-time messages — pipelines, fan-out, supervisor patterns.
Queen-led coordination with raft, byzantine, gossip, CRDT, or quorum strategies. Byzantine mode tolerates f < n/3 faulty agents.
AgentDB-backed persistent memory with HNSW indexing — semantic search across sessions, namespaces shared by every agent in the swarm.
A pgvector-compatible extension with 230+ SQL functions, SIMD, and quantization. CREATE EXTENSION swarmvector — verified on PostgreSQL 16.
27 lifecycle hooks and 12 background workers record what succeeded, train routing patterns, and preload context before you ask.
Why use many token when few token do trick. /caveman-compress rewrites memory files into few-token caveman-speak — substance, code, and URLs preserved, backup kept. Vendored from the 82k-star original (MIT).
The laziest senior dev in the room, on demand. /ponytail forces the simplest solution that works: YAGNI, stdlib before dependencies, one line before fifty. Three intensities + audit and review lenses (MIT).
Eleven segments, three presets, one checklist. Run /statusline inside Claude Code and tick exactly what you want to see.
Honest numbers
Benchmarks live in the repo and every claim is labeled. No mystery multipliers.
Efficiency
Two of the most-loved Claude Code skills ship inside swarmdo as first-class features — vendored MIT forks, integrated into the CLI, the agents, and the init wizard. Toggle them per project with swarmdo efficiency on|off.
Memory files (CLAUDE.md, notes, todos) get re-read every session — and they're written for humans, not token budgets. /caveman-compress rewrites them in few-token caveman-speak: substance, code, and URLs preserved, original backed up.
Also a CLI command — works outside Claude Code entirely:swarmdo compress CLAUDE.md · --check for a token-free dry run.
The laziest senior dev in the room, on demand. /ponytail applies one lens to everything: the best code is the code never written.
Three intensities (lite · full · ultra) plus audit, review, and debt lenses. And it reaches the swarm too: pass ponytail: true when spawning an agent — or set SWARMDO_PONYTAIL=1 — and every spawned agent inherits the persona.
Explicit ponytail: false always wins over the env. Skills are user-invoked: on means available, never automatic.
Vendored with attribution from the MIT originals: caveman by Julius Brussee and ponytail by Dietrich Gebert — see NOTICE.
Self-contained
No runtime downloads from third-party registries, no surprise upstream churn. Each engine is vendored, renamed, smoke-tested, and file-linked.
| Engine | What it is | Form |
|---|---|---|
| swarmvector | Vector database — HNSW, ONNX embeddings (384-dim), Graph RAG | native + wasm |
| swarmvector-postgres | Postgres extension, pgvector drop-in, pg 14–17 | pgrx crate |
| swarmllm | Local model layer — MicroLoRA adapters, SONA learning | native + wasm |
| swarmdo-swarm | Swarm MCP server — cognitive patterns, neural agents | node + wasm |
| agentdb | Agent memory store — vectors, reinforcement learning | vendored |
| agentic-flow | Agent runtime integration and ONNX embedding backend | vendored |
| @swarmnet/bmssp | Graph pathfinding for agent topology routing | wasm |
Install
Scaffolds .claude/ with agents, skills, hooks, and the /statusline command.
Registers the MCP server — 200+ tools for agents, memory, and coordination.
Claude Code spawns the agents; swarmdo coordinates, remembers, and learns.
FAQ
swarmdo turns Claude Code into a coordinated multi-agent system. One prompt spawns a swarm of named agents — researcher, architect, coder, tester, reviewer — that coordinate over messages, share persistent vector memory, and learn from what worked.
Yes — it’s built for it. swarmdo registers as an MCP server (200+ tools), ships agents and skills into .claude/, and adds slash commands like /statusline. Codex runs alongside through the dual-mode package.
MIT licensed, based on the original popular ruflo — attribution preserved in LICENSE and NOTICE. Every engine is vendored in the repo; nothing phones home.
The vector engine family: an embedded vector database with HNSW indexing and ONNX embeddings, plus a pgvector-compatible Postgres extension — CREATE EXTENSION swarmvector — with 230+ SQL functions, verified on PostgreSQL 16.
npx swarmdo init --wizard, then claude mcp add swarmdo -- npx -y @swarmdo/cli@latest. Ask Claude Code to “use a swarm” and swarmdo does the coordinating.