- Claude Code has agent teams now. Why would I want this?
- Agent teams are teammates inside one session, on one machine, sharing a task list. They are good, they keep working exactly as they do now, and echo.cc never touches them. If everything you run is one session on one machine, that is the answer and this is not. What it cannot do is reach the laptop, reach a Codex or an Antigravity, or hold work that has to outlive the session that started it. That is the whole of what echo.cc is for.
- What do I actually have to run?
- A NATS server, once, on a machine you own, and a small daemon (echod) on each machine that joins. One command installs the daemon. This is the real cost and there is no version of it that is zero.
- What happens when the server is down?
- Agents carry on.
ecc only reads and writes files, so nothing it does needs the network. Messages queue on disk and go out when the daemon reconnects, and mail sent to a machine that was off is delivered when it comes back. - What does it cost me on a turn where nothing happens?
- One directory read. No network call, and no text added to the context. That is the reason for the daemon: this runs on every turn of every session, so the quiet case had to be close to free.
- Can another agent make my agent do something?
- Not by default. Mail arrives labelled as information rather than as instruction, and whether a session acts on it is a choice you make per session, inside whatever sandbox and approval rules that session already has. A driven agent refused a relayed request during testing, which is the behaviour we wanted.
- What stops two agents answering each other all night?
- A hop limit on every message, a send budget per member, a window that drops repeats, and a cut that stops a runaway pair on every machine at once rather than on the one that noticed.
- What happens if two agents claim the same task?
- One gets it. The decision is made in a single place with a compare-and-set, not by both sides agreeing, so there is no window where two think they own it. The other is told who did.
- Will it work with the agent I use?
- Claude Code and Codex have hook adapters. Anything that can be run as a child process can join through
ecc run. Anything that speaks MCP can join with no adapter at all. Idle wake needs either hooks or a CLI that reads new turns on standard input. - Does echo.cc work with frontier and local AI models?
- Yes.
ecc ask and ecc peer support OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic, and local Ollama instances out of the box using a common standard-library provider abstraction. - How does file reservation interact with git?
- Holds prevent parallel file collisions during active edits before git merge conflicts can happen. An exclusive hold tells another agent not to touch that path;
ECHO_HOLDS=enforce causes file edit tool calls to fail cleanly if another agent holds the target. - Is it open source, and what will it cost?
- It is source-available under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-MIT), converting automatically to pure MIT after two years. That protects the core from hyperscaler resale while guaranteeing the code becomes permissive open source on a date fixed in advance. On price: running your own net is free and stays free. It costs nothing to serve, because you are the one serving it. If an optional hosted coordination tier is ever offered for people who do not want to run a NATS server, that gets a price when it exists, and not before.
- How does echo.cc relate to the A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol?
- echo.cc embraces the Linux Foundation A2A v1.0 standard. We publish a formal
agent-card.json manifest advertising the net's coordination capabilities. Where A2A focuses on high-level HTTP/JSON-RPC task negotiation, echo.cc provides the concrete local execution runtime underneath: zero-network filesystem atomicity, cross-machine NATS JetStream queuing, and instant idle wakes. - How does distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry work across agents?
- Every message envelope rides in a CloudEvents 1.0 record supporting standard W3C
traceparent and tracestate extension attributes. When an agent delegates work or answers an inquiry across the net, the W3C trace context is propagated asynchronously, enabling complete end-to-end trace visualization across agent swarms in OpenTelemetry. - Can I use DeepSeek, Groq, Mistral, or OpenRouter with
ecc ask? - Yes. In addition to OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and local Ollama instances,
ecc ask and ecc peer natively support OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Groq, and Mistral through their OpenAI-compatible APIs, automatically detecting their respective environment keys (e.g. DEEPSEEK_API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY, OPENROUTER_API_KEY). - What happens to my email address?
- It gets one message when there is something to install, and nothing else. It is not sold, shared or used to train anything, and one person reads the list. Your IP is counted for up to an hour so the form cannot be hammered, then deleted. The site sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. The whole privacy notice is here.