Cross-Machine Coordination: Run Your Agent Fleet Across Multiple Machines

initech now supports cross-machine coordination. Run initech serve on any machine — a workstation, a remote GPU box, a cloud VM — and the local TUI streams all its agent panes live. One terminal. Every agent. Any machine.

The problem it solves

A typical setup: MacBook running the TUI, workbench doing the heavy lifting. Before this feature, you needed separate terminal windows per machine, no unified view, and manual SSH to coordinate anything across them. Agents on the workbench were invisible to the supervisor on the MacBook unless you opened a separate shell.

The supervisor should see and message every agent regardless of which machine it runs on.

How it works

The remote machine runs initech serve — a headless daemon that launches agents without a TUI and listens on TCP for incoming connections. The local TUI connects, and a yamux session multiplexes everything over a single TCP connection: one stream per remote pane for live PTY output, plus a control stream for IPC (send, peek, status).

No SSH tunneling. No port forwarding. Direct TCP, token-authenticated.

Setup

Remote machine (workbench)

Add mode: headless, a peer_name, a listen address, and a shared token to the remote machine's initech.yaml:

project: myproject
root: /home/user/myproject
mode: headless
peer_name: workbench
listen: ":7391"
token: "your-shared-secret"

roles:
  - eng1
  - eng2
  - eng3

Then start the daemon:

$ initech serve

That's it. The daemon launches all configured agents and waits for connections.

Local machine (laptop)

Add a remotes: block to the local initech.yaml pointing at the remote machine:

project: myproject
root: /Users/you/myproject
token: "your-shared-secret"

roles:
  - super
  - pm
  - qa1

remotes:
  workbench:
    addr: "192.168.1.100:7391"

Launch the TUI normally:

$ initech

The TUI connects to each configured remote, discovers its agents, and renders them alongside local panes in the grid. Remote panes are indistinguishable from local ones except for the host prefix in the overlay.

Addressing remote agents

All IPC commands accept host:agent syntax:

$ initech send workbench:eng1 "start the API refactor"
$ initech peek workbench:eng2 -n 30
$ initech status

initech status shows a HOST column when remotes are present. initech peers lists every connected machine and its agents:

$ initech peers

  PEER           AGENTS
  workbench      eng1  eng2  eng3

initech doctor validates connectivity to each configured remote before you start a session.

Auto-reconnect

If the connection to a remote drops — network blip, machine sleep, daemon restart — the TUI reconnects automatically when the peer comes back. Remote panes show a disconnected state during the gap. No manual intervention needed.

What this enables

Right now: run compute-heavy agents (large context, long tool chains) on a workbench with more RAM and CPU, while the supervisor and QA agents run on the laptop. The TUI on the laptop sees everything.

Longer term: a fleet of dedicated agent machines, each running initech serve with a role specialization, all visible and addressable from one terminal. The session lives on the coordinator machine. Agents live wherever makes sense.

Try it

curl -fsSL https://initech.sh/install.sh | bash

# On the remote machine:
# Add mode/peer_name/listen/token to initech.yaml, then:
initech serve

# On the local machine:
# Add remotes: block to initech.yaml, then:
initech

Source and operator guide: github.com/nmelo/initech

Related docs:

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