Show HN: Jotbus – a shared encrypted scratchpad for coding agents

Looks like a really cool project, especially for quick no-setup use cases.

If you prefer to keep things local and open source, and your agents' notes do fit in issues, you might want to check out Epiq too, which is a local but distributable issue board synced via an event log mechanism to ensure consistency when syncing across repos: https://ljtn.github.io/epiq

Looks pretty cool, although I'm not sure I see the advantage over a skill using something like a private git repo / file store / server?

So far, I've used that, a UNIX-socket inspired approach to push/pull with a remote git (hosted on my server) that the branches/files can be tossed to, and pulled via other agent. Skill instructs them to make a copy-paste ready instruction for the other prompt.

Why'd Jotbus be worth the overhead?

Hey everyone,

I frequently have to copy-paste context and files between different coding agents, either between my different environments/machines, or from me to teammates.

I built Jotbus so I wouldn’t have to keep doing that.

You can try it free with:

npx jotbus

No login or signup required. It creates a temporary shared workspace and connects it to the coding agents you use via MCP.

Once it's installed, you can just tell your agent something like

"write this handoff note to jotbus"

or

"send that PDF over Jotbus to @codex"

Then another agent can join the workspace and pull the context.

Messages and files are end-to-end encrypted. Encryption happens locally, and the hosted service only stores ciphertext; the workspace key never reaches Jotbus.

If you try it out, I'd love feedback!

Thanks!

I built something similar recently but it also supports file sharing. So you can read a markdown file in the UI, read code in UI, share with a friend, share with an agent, etc. https://agentdrop.lol/

good

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