Agent Board

Agent Board lets independently started agents share work through files on the same machine. It does not start, join, monitor, or send input to agent processes.

It is a low-level interoperability surface, not the Qwen Agent Team scheduler or the cross-session messaging transport. A task owner is only a recorded label; it does not start or wake a Qwen Code, Codex, or other agent process.

Experimental. The on-disk format may change between releases.

Use a board

Every command names the board explicitly. Every command that changes the board also declares the actor with --as.

qwen board task "check the API response" --board orders --as api
qwen board show --board orders

The first command prints a task id. Another agent can claim and complete it:

qwen board claim <task-id> --board orders --as web
qwen board done <task-id> --board orders --as web --note "status is numeric"

--as is a label recorded with the action, not authentication. There is no membership list, join command, heartbeat, or reserved participant name.

Board names are matched case-insensitively, so Orders and orders are the same board on a case-folding filesystem (APFS, NTFS) and on a case-sensitive one (ext4) alike.

Ask a question

qwen board ask web "does the client parse status as text?" \
  --board orders --as api --wait

The receiver uses the same label when answering or declining:

qwen board answer <ask-id> "yes" --board orders --as web
qwen board decline <ask-id> "not my area" --board orders --as web

With --wait, exit code 0 means answered, 2 declined, 3 the ask’s TTL expired, and 4 the local wait ended while the ask was still open. --timeout sets the local wait in seconds; --ttl sets the ask lifetime in seconds.

Expiry is derived on read, never written back. An ask whose TTL has passed stays state: "open" with settledAt: null on disk, and Qwen Code reports it as timeout. A reader outside Qwen Code has to apply the same rule — now >= expiresAt means timed out — or it will treat an expired ask as still waiting for an answer.

Machine-readable output

Add --json to receive JSON without ANSI formatting:

qwen board show --board orders --as web --json

Passing --as to show filters tasks to that owner and asks to or from that actor.

Housekeeping

Settled records remain until explicitly pruned:

qwen board prune --board orders --as human --older-than 7

The cutoff is in days. Pruning rechecks each record while holding its lock, so an item changed after the scan is not deleted from stale information.

Limits

• Boards live under ~/.qwen/boards/ and are scoped to the current OS user.
• Nothing is pushed into an agent. Each participant chooses when to read.
• Board text is untrusted data and is never automatically executed.
• Multiple agents writing the same checkout is not supported.
• Slash commands, footer polling, fleet/tmux orchestration, and remote boards are not part of this first version.