agents need three things: supervision, isolation, and a way to talk to each other. your linux box already ships all three.
so each agent is a linux user running an agentic cli (claude code, codex, whatever) as a systemd service. supervision is systemd: Restart=on-failure, for free. isolation is unix users + cgroups. i didn't build a sandbox, i created users. each user is an agent. logs are journald. coordination is one bash cli they all call, the same binary i call. 5dive agent ask coder "is the auth refactor safe to merge?" blocks until the coder agent answers. bigger handoffs go through a shared queue backed by a single sqlite file.
no broker, no daemon, no bespoke protocol. linux shipped all of it years ago.
going multi-box needed nothing new. i didn't add a transport, i added ssh. 5dive fleet send coder@box2 "ship it" just runs ssh box2 '5dive agent send coder …'. each box is a peer running the same cli. no broker, no message bus. the only real limit is delivery guarantees: no retries, no exactly-once. need those and you're building a queue. a team of agents doesn't.
mit: github.com/5dive-ai/5dive
supervision, isolation, ipc: linux solved all three decades ago, and hardened them in production longer than any agent framework has existed. the best runtime for a team of agents isn't something you install. it's the box you already own.
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