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M8Shift wordmarkAI agents,
Working in shifts.

Pronounced mate-shift — AI team mates working in shifts. Free and open source. Coordinate your AI teammates — Claude, Codex, Gemini, Vibe, and other coding agents — on one repository: exactly one writes at a time, and every handoff stays recorded.

M8Shift logo
v4.2.0 — certified premises, preserved classifications

A listener reserves the pen before the expensive work and unclaim gives an unused claim back; advanced certifies an identified premise, never mere authorship; terminal, rate-limit and neutral classifications survive a transport timeout with their no-retry doctrine intact; degraded evidence says so end to end; and the test gate may fail but can no longer hang. Read the release history →

Quick Start

local install

Terminal install for macOS. Verifies files, installs locally, then runs init. Add --with-rtk only with consent.

$ cd /path/to/project
$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/M8Shift/M8Shift/main/install.sh | bash -s -- --agents claude,codex

Shell install for Linux, WSL, or Git Bash. No sudo and no global PATH change; optional RTK is local and same-tag-checksummed.

$ cd /path/to/project
$ curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/M8Shift/M8Shift/main/install.sh | bash -s -- --agents claude,codex

Native PowerShell install for Windows. Verification is enabled by default.

PS> cd C:\path\to\project
PS> irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/M8Shift/M8Shift/main/install.ps1 | iex
SHA256-checked against the selected ref. Downloads core, worktree, runtime, and context scripts. Optional RTK/Headroom stay explicit.macOSLinuxWindows

See your team at work

A read-only top-style dashboard shows the whole relay at a glance — who holds the pen, the turn history, usage windows, the ledger, and how much time was effective work versus waiting — without ever claiming the pen or changing relay state.

The m8shift-top dashboard: pen holder, TTL gauge, agents with usage, listeners, current turn, ledger, bounded activity, and the effective-time strip. Illustrative placeholder data.

Read the dashboard reference →

Why Multi-Agent

Single assistants are strong on punctual tasks. Multi-step repository work needs a small team shape: plan, produce, review, correct, document, and arbitrate without losing context.

Broader pattern

Liora's article Crew AI: the framework that transforms AIs into office colleagues describes the same shift from one-off assistants toward specialized agents, shared context, coordination, and human arbitration.

AIs have cognitive biases — just like us

A single AI agent has no check on its own biases. M8Shift doesn't debias the model — it structures the work so an independent, model-diverse turn, anchored in deterministic tests and a human arbiter, catches what one agent would wave through. Here is how far that actually goes, bias by bias.

How true is this? Honestly — structural, not magic.

M8Shift can't make an AI unbiased; the agents still have these biases. What it does is structure the process so the bias is checked, not trusted: an independent turn that must refute, ideally a different model family, a verdict anchored in tests a confident hallucination can't pass, and a human who arbitrates. The benefit holds only when the contradiction is real — two agreeing agents, especially the same model, form an echo chamber that amplifies the bias instead. Full analysis in the security audit's bias note.

Practical Use Cases

M8Shift helps when one assistant is not enough and the work benefits from explicit roles, handoffs, and review.

Explore all use cases →

Documentation for humans and agents

The homepage explains the product. The rest of the site is the operating manual for humans and AI agents that need a shared way to communicate, hand off work, and inspect state.

M8Shift is deliberately narrow: it does not host models, replace your IDE, or become the project manager. It gives teammates — human or AI — a local, inspectable relay.

Frequently asked questions

Common questions about M8Shift and how it works.

Read the full FAQ →

Project status

M8Shift is a free and open-source local CLI. The roadmap separates what is shipped today from the protocol stages still being specified.

Built with ❤️ and M8Shift · Accessibility · r/m8shift