Hi HN!
I'm Manuel, CTO of Tandem.
Most of our PRs are now written by custom coding agents on remote hosts. But we had a recurring problem: they sometimes lacked product context and consequently guessed too much. This resulted in some PRs coming back a bit off, with some wrong choices. We ended up spending more time fixing the PRs than if we had made them ourselves.
So we built teletap, first for ourselves, and now for everyone. How it works: when an agent is stuck on something it can't find itself, it asks a person on the team. It picks the best person to help it, based on a short "when to ask" description each developer specifies, like "pricing owner", or AGENTS.md instructions. The question pops up on that engineer's computer. They answer it, and it goes straight back into the agent's session, which is now unblocked and can continue. If the engineer doesn't know, they just have to say so, and the agent will ask someone else.
Many teams use Slack for this. We tried it too. But we didn't find it productive enough. The agent had to keep checking a thread. An idle session never saw the reply. With teletap, the answer is delivered directly into the session, even if it's idle.
It works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Hermes and Pi. Just install it on a device (your computer, a VM, a Docker container, a VPS...), and it finds all the installed agents and plugs into them. We were inspired by Tailscale, which we love. Devices talk peer-to-peer, encrypted end to end, and fall back to our relay only when a direct path is impossible (the relay never sees the content). It's very minimal: you don't have to live in another interface.
In case you're wondering, we wrote it in Rust and everything runs over QUIC, on a single UDP socket. The most fun part of the project was the integration with agents, figuring out how to put the answer into a live session. For instance, Claude Code has an internal messaging socket (CLAUDE_CODE_MESSAGING_SOCKET), while the messaging for Codex works through its app-server. For pi, we developed a plugin (how surprising).
Short video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z224uyyxuYQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z224uyyxuYQ)
Website with install instructions: [https://teletap.dev](https://teletap.dev)
We'd love your feedback, especially from teams that run agents in the cloud.
Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50377644](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50377644)
Points: 1