hcom is an open-source agent orchestration harness developed by aannoo in Rust. It is built to coordinate, route, and manage multi-agent processes and native subagents, featuring deep lifecycle handling for AI systems like Claude subagents. Operating in developer terminal and multi-agent backend workflows, hcom acts as an execution harness that correlates agent calls, intercepts execution hooks (such as SubagentStart and SubagentStop), and serializes agent states. It guarantees deterministic routing, persistent task ownership, and structured relay communication across parallel subagent instances. Unlike superficial agent wrappers, hcom focuses on low-level correctness, race-condition mitigation, and concurrency control. It uses transactional allocations and transient stop-claim concurrency guards to prevent duplicate hook registrations from dropping message deliveries, while enforcing cascading teardowns across deeply nested subagent hierarchies. hcom is an open-source project hosted on GitHub under active development with versioned releases distributed via the Cargo ecosystem.
Actor-First Routing — Routes messages and tasks using explicit agent identifiers and session-scoped spawn ownership. - Atomic Subagent Allocation — Prevents naming collisions and race conditions during concurrent sibling subagent launches via transactional guards. - Deduplicated Lifecycle Hooks — Handles subagent start and stop invocations with payload fingerprinting and concurrency claims to prevent dropped message relays. - Cascading Subagent Teardown — Cleanly terminates nested subagent child trees when parent tasks or root sessions end. - Persistent State & Task Tracking — Manages agent-to-owner mappings, relay message queues, and execution statuses in an embedded transactional database.
Use cases
Use Case: Orchestrating Nested Multi-Agent Workflows Developers building recursive agent hierarchies can run subagents that spawn further child agents, relying on hcom to maintain execution lineage and prevent orphaned background processes on termination.
Use Case: High-Concurrency Agent Swarms Teams running parallel subagents for automated code generation and review can prevent resource allocation collisions and ensure reliable message delivery across concurrent instances.
Use Case: Deterministic Lifecycle and Hook Handling Engineers integrating native Claude subagent hooks can handle asynchronous starts, duplicate teardown signals, and resumed sessions without dropped messages or hanging state locks.
Who it is for
hcom is aimed at systems engineers, AI toolchain developers, and platform teams orchestrating multi-agent architectures and Claude subagent lifecycles at the infrastructure level. It is not intended for non-technical users seeking a turnkey graphical chat assistant.
Install guide
Installation Install hcom using Rust's Cargo package manager (standard method for Rust-based CLI tools): bash cargo install --git https://github.com/aannoo/hcom Or build from source: bash git clone https://github.com/aannoo/hcom.git cd hcom cargo build --release
First Run Verify that the binary is available in your PATH: bash hcom --help Ensure any required agent runtime environments or API credentials (such as your Anthropic API keys) are configured in your shell environment: bash export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-api-key-here"
Example Session Initialize an orchestrated multi-agent harness session: bash hcom run --session-id session_01 --task "Analyze workspace and run subagent tests"
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