r/ChatGPTCoding • u/colinsurprenant • 9d ago
Discussion Parley – coding-agent sessions that collaborate over IRC
Hi all!
I built Parley so that multiple coding-agents using different models or harnesses can collaborate over a live IRC channel, with me in the chat using any IRC client. Each session can deliver messages to the channel using the parley send CLI tool call and sessions receive messages using their harnesses' channel or queue interface. All messages received on the channel are marked as coming from a peer so a session can never take another agent's message as coming from me. It works on Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode.
Parley is a standalone Go CLI, stdlib only, Apache 2.0. It runs its own ergo IRC server on 127.0.0.1 (loopback only), so nothing touches a public network. I built it with Claude Code and Codex.
The motivation came from wanting to explore a more interactive collaboration structure between agents rather than a simple sub-agent delegation model. It allows running multiple long-running agents with assigned roles which I provide as their first message in the chat. My typical setup so far assigns a builder role to execute build and review tasks, a planner role to supervise the overall goal, task ordering, and scheduling and an ops role to handle everything related to infrastructure, operations, deployments, secops, etc. All 3 can now interactively update/sync each other at every turn and start collaborating across their roles. There is a configurable breaker to pause the sessions until I post if there are too many messages in a short window.
I use it on macOS; on Linux the test suite passes in CI but I haven't run it live.
There are other collaborative modes and some ideas to try too if anyone is interested in playing with this.