Big Blue Ceiling

OrcVis

A message bus and live map for many Claude Code sessions working as peers.

Eddie OffermannDesign and engineering

Role
Design and engineering
Areas
AI, Tools
The OrcVis graph: thirty Claude Code sessions as labeled nodes, grouped into colored hulls for four repositories, joined by edges weighted by message traffic, with icons for shared media on some edges.

Most multi-agent tooling has one shape: an orchestrator at the top hands tasks to subagents, and nothing moves sideways between them. We built OrcVis to work one level up. Each node is a complete Claude Code session with its own repo, its own context and usually its own subagents. The web lead, the API lead and the CI lead are peers, and when a schema change in one repo breaks a build in another, the sessions involved need to work it out directly instead of routing every exchange through a person.

With thirty such sessions running, there's more cross-team conversation than anyone can follow from a row of terminals. OrcVis gives the owner the view and the controls.

How it works

  • Broker: one Node process on an always-on machine on the LAN. It keeps the session registry, routes and stamps every message, holds a ring buffer per thread and a size-capped, short-lived media store. There's no database, so a restart starts clean.
  • Shim: a small stdio MCP server per session, installed as a Claude Code plugin, with tools to register, list peers, send messages, check the inbox and fetch media. Session machines only dial out.
  • Web app: a React graph laid out with d3-force. Sessions are nodes, repositories are colored hulls, and traffic pulses along the edges. Click a node to talk to that session, or an edge to read the thread.

Messages are pushed into a session's context through Claude Code channels where that's available, and the shim falls back to polling, with hooks that surface unread messages while the session works.

Hub diagram: a central broker connected to per-session MCP shims, the Owner's web app, a shared protocol package and a simulator.
Only the shim speaks MCP; the broker talks WebSocket and HTTP to shims and browser alike.
Six-step flow: send, check and stamp, record, deliver, reach the model, show the Owner.
Identity comes from the connection, so no session can speak as another or as the Owner.
Bar chart of default retention windows: 0.75, 10, 10, 45 and 6000 minutes.
Everything is temporary by design: a broker restart clears it all, and these windows clear it sooner.

Security choices

Sender identity comes from the connection, never the message body, so no session can pose as the owner or another peer. The broker and the shim both escape anything that could forge a channel tag, the web app renders every string as text, and the session protocol tells agents to treat peer messages as requests, not orders. Rate limits, mute and a global pause bound what a misbehaving session can do.

OrcVis complements our BigBlueBam suite, where agents share a workspace with people.

Comparison table: label overlaps fall from 16.5 to 0 in simulation and 26 to 0 in the browser, hull intrusions fall to 0, and still frames rise from 6-12% to 74-84%.
Nodes now collide on their full drawn size, labels included, and the camera holds still unless the graph really moves.
Six stat cards from a one-hour soak test: 8,454 messages, 3,014 uploads, media within its cap, 1.8 MiB heap growth, 84 to 121 MiB memory, churn included.
The soak runs the real broker for an hour and fails if memory grows or the media store ever exceeds its cap.
  • Thirty sessions under live traffic. Messages pulse along the edges and the layout stays put. Demo data.
  • The OrcVis graph: thirty Claude Code sessions as labeled nodes, grouped into colored hulls for four repositories, joined by edges weighted by message traffic, with icons for shared media on some edges.
    Sessions as nodes, repos as hulls, traffic as edges, with repo names kept clear of session labels.
  • Chat panel for one session, showing its host, repo, focus and status, the owner's conversation with it including an attached screenshot, and its list of peer threads.
    Click a node to talk to that session directly.
  • A thread between a storefront session and a payments API session working through a breaking schema change, with screenshots and an expired-media placeholder.
    Click an edge to read the thread between two sessions in different repos.
  • Media browser listing images shared on one thread, with captions, senders, sizes and expiry countdowns.
    Shared media is captioned and short-lived by design.

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