buddylist turns Claude Code, Codex and Gemini into MSN Messenger buddies, and a nudge stops them mid-task

Buddylist on a Windows XP style desktop, a contact list of coding agents beside an open chat window — Image: buddylist.dev

“Chat with your coding agents like it’s 2005,” says the top of buddylist.dev, and the app means it down to the scrollbars. Every project folder shows up as a buddy. Open one and you get a messenger window wired to a real agent session that can read the project, run commands and edit files. Claude Code comes built in. Codex, Gemini, OpenCode and Hermes ride on the CLIs you already have installed, “with the same login, settings and MCP servers.”

The MSN bits are working parts. A nudge doesn’t just rattle the window: “A nudge shakes the window and stops the agent,” the site says. “When an agent needs you, it nudges you back.” Status means something too. Online is ready, Busy is at work, and Away “is waiting for you to approve something.”

Those approvals show up as invitations, the way a file transfer used to. The docs put it plainly: “A command or an edit comes as an invitation,” with Accept, Always allow and Decline buttons.

Then there’s the group chat. Invite Codex into a conversation with Claude, add Gemini, and they share one window and one folder. “Ask Claude Code to build, Codex to review, and Gemini to test,” the home page pitches. The handoff is an @mention. “A reply that says @Codex please review gives Codex a turn, unless Codex is paused,” the group conversations guide says. They get six turns per message of yours by default before they wait for you, and “A nudge stops them all.”

The site’s own before-and-after table names the chore it replaces: “Pasting one agent’s answer into another’s terminal.”

It comes from T. Safa Elmalı (@safaelmali), an Istanbul developer whose site says he is “building at beehiiv.” It shipped as Agent Messenger on October 7, per its changelog, “First public packaged release for Apple Silicon Macs.” Windows and Linux builds followed on October 18. The GitHub releases page lists 43 builds between October 7 and October 23. One catch for the open-source crowd: the repository’s README says “This repository holds the downloads; the source is private.”

Steal this

Before you flip any agent to Never ask, check the folder. The FAQ says it “lets the agent run anything, so only use it in folders you don’t mind breaking.” Kind of like leaving the door unlocked only on the house you’re about to tear down.
Adding OpenCode or Hermes to a group? Read their rows first. The FAQ says OpenCode’s Build mode “changes files and runs commands without asking, unless your opencode.json says otherwise,” and Hermes “runs any command it doesn’t find dangerous.” One guest who never knocks makes the whole party’s rules optional.
When agents start passing work back and forth, set the turn cap under Settings > Teams before the first big task. The changelog lists 3, 6, 10, 20 or 50. This is like setting a spending limit on a card before handing it to a teenager.
The app sends anonymous usage counts to PostHog and crash reports to Sentry, per its FAQ. On a work machine, turn off Tools > Share anonymous usage data and Tools > Send error reports on day one, the same way you’d check which apps can see your location on a new phone.

Why it matters

The approval prompt finally has a home. Every coding agent asks before it edits, and in a terminal that question scrolls away with everything else. Turning it into an Away status on a contact list means you can see at a glance which project is stuck waiting on you.

Multi-agent stopped being a pipeline. Build-review-test across three vendors usually means three terminals and a clipboard. Here it’s one conversation where each agent reads what the others did, and the off switch is a nudge.

The manager is already in it. A project manager contact is “a Claude contact that oversees the other conversations working on it, each in a worktree of its own.” It reads every change, “changes no files and runs nothing,” and when something has to change it “writes that conversation a message, and asks you first.”

The 2005 skin is the joke, and the joke is doing real work. Instant messaging already solved presence, interruption and “who’s waiting on me” twenty years ago, so an agent that’s Busy, Away or nudgeable needs no manual. The terminal-tab-per-agent setup looks likely to lose to whatever lets one person watch five agents the way they once watched five friends.

The hard part is the one the turn cap hints at. Six handoffs per message is the default, and it goes up to 50. Nobody knows yet what three agents from three companies do on turn 49 with nobody watching, or how many people will find out.

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