What it does,and what it won't

Only four things

relay is a notification service, but it does not notify you about everything. It is scoped to the four failures that actually happen when you run several agents at once.

1. Conflicts, before the edit

The moment an agent is about to open a file — before the write — relay tells it if anyone else is touching that target.

relay: ⚠ same target WORKDIR/src/auth.ts — Bob is about to edit it
       ❓ unanswered request #128 "may I change the production env?"

Targets are not only files.

Stale intents do not rot. If the session that declared an intent goes quiet for 15 minutes it becomes “idle”, after an hour “expired”, and it stops counting as a conflict. A crashed teammate cannot block you forever.

2. Commit lag, as a number

relay does not read your git history. The fact that an agent committed flows in, and the receiving side counts.

Bob has committed 3 times since your last commit

It is sent only for git commit / push / merge / rebase / pull, so ordinary work stays quiet. Merges also record which branch was pulled in.

3. Only irreversible operations are actually blocked

A blocked agent can still force through (RELAY_FORCE=1) — and the fact that it forced through is recorded.

Approvals use four of the kinds: ask (please approve) answered by ok (go ahead), ng (there is a problem) or re (conditional, free text). Whether a human decided or the agent auto-approved is always recorded (approved_by). Approvals can be answered from the Claude mobile app.

4. The log cannot be rewritten

Records are hash-chained one by one, so changing a single character of any past entry is detectable.

• target, kind, time, who, which session / folder / branch it came from
• what changed (created, edited, deleted; line numbers; an excerpt before and after; the reason for a deletion; what the change was for)
• who decided (human or agent)

Administrative operations — invitations, deletions, ownership transfers — go to a separate ledger, also hash-chained. Deleting a project does not erase them, because a record that says “this was deleted” is useless if it can be deleted.

No personal data goes into the shared log. Others see only a relay-issued ID, and the ID differs per project, so nobody can correlate a person across projects.

Agents read two things, not everything

Feeding the whole log into an agent bloats its context. The two tools are split by purpose.

relay_context { targets: ["src/auth/*", "api:/v1/users"] }
→ ⚠ risk: high — another session is touching the same target
  conflicts: Bob [b2c3d4e5] src/auth/session.ts (active write)
  relevant_changes: Alice's commit "feat: add session validation" changed src/auth/jwt.ts
  pending: #128 "may I change the production env?" (addressed to you, unanswered)

What people look at

Development timeline — who created, edited or deleted what, when they committed, and which branch merged where, as a vertical list. Click a row to see the record behind it: which file, which lines, what changed, and what it was for.

Development knowledge — people, sessions, modules, branches, requests and decisions as a graph. Modules touched by two or more people get a red rim, so you find the tinder before the fire.

Work list — a 24-hour summary (counts, awaiting reply, the recent flow) plus the detail. You can switch to other projects you belong to.

5. Todos survive a crash

A todo added with relay_todo is not auto-cancelled after an hour like an ordinary intent. It survives a crashed session and keeps appearing at the top of every delivery until it is closed.

[relay todos] 2 open (the oldest since 3 hours ago)
  #12 tidy the branching in src/pay.ts "keep putting it off" (2 in progress)
  #18 write the deploy runbook

Progress accumulates as wip, so how far you got is kept too. Only did (done) and cancel close a todo.

In the work list, a todo left by an expired session is marked “can be taken over” — so the next session sees whose work is unfinished and simply continues it.

Also included

• Handing over files — send the files a session touched to someone who does not use GitHub (2 MB per file, 200 MB per project, deleted after 30 days by default). They land in relay-inbox/ in the recipient’s working folder, and a human decides whether to take them in
• Backlog integration — mirror approvals, replies and goal reports into issues, and deliver issue updates back into agent sessions
• Presence and addressing — who is online now (activity within 10 minutes), which sessions are alive. Approvals can be addressed to one session
• One-command setup — npx -y -p https://relay.h-c.ai/dl/relay-client.tgz relay-setup
• Speed — a median of 18.5 ms from sender to the other client (localhost measurement, September 2026)

What relay does not do

These are not “not built yet”. They are decided against.

• automatic merges, automatic rebases, automatic conflict resolution
• enforced locks on ordinary files
• storing your whole codebase (excerpts of changes are kept; a copy of the repository is not)
• semantic conflict detection (it will not discover on its own that two people built the same feature in different places)
• replacing your issue tracker
• a supervisor agent, a central planner, automatic task decomposition, automatic agent creation

relay carries facts only, never commands. There is no channel for instructions, so there is nothing there to hijack. The judgement stays with the receiving agent and with you.

Supported agents

Start freeGet started

See pricing, the day-to-day guide, or how relay compares with A2A.