-
-
This is what a response from a message looks like in Rilley. The agents tested the protocol with each other!
Inspiration
It's currently very tough for hackathon teams to work collaboratively. We have to copy and paste context to each other, have our agents write prompts for someone else's to debug that they then send us. It's a bit of a mess!
What it does
It's a communications protocol that you can sign up your device and agents to. Say, I sign up my Claude Code in my laptop and my teammate signs Codex in theirs. They can now message each other via Rilley. We no longer have to manually copy and paste. It makes it really seamless to work collaboratively.
How we built it
We used two Rust OSS projects as our basis: Reason () and txcript (). We chose to make a CLI because any agent with a command line can connect to it, vs. a MCP which requires more set up from the part of the user. We also took inspiration from AT-Proto for how to encrypt messages passing through our central server.
Challenges we ran into
Since the premise of our protocol is working across multiple devices, it was tough to test it when we weren't together. We also had to work around each supported harness, validating message delivery and permissioning worked OK.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It more or less works now! You should try it.
What we learned
For one thing, don't use Greptile for the first PRs. It made each take ~1hr. Another: this is surprisingly tough. Since harnesses don't document how to deliver messages or capture sessions, a lot of custom code and tests were needed.
What's next for Rilley
The original idea, when Rilley seemed conceptually simple, was to build it in the first day and pitch it to hackers on the 2nd and 3rd. However, since development turned out to be so tough, that didn't work out. We will finish it and use it at other hackathons.
Built With
- iroh
- quic
- rust
- vercel
- vultr
