TURBINE

§ 0. ABSTRACT

Turbine is a coordination layer for multi-agent AI systems. It addresses the fundamental challenges of orchestrating 10-30 concurrent AI coding agents: rate limit management, cost optimization, and unified observability. Turbine operates as a companion to existing orchestration frameworks, adding intelligence without replacing core functionality.

§ 1. THE COORDINATION PROBLEM

Modern AI-assisted development has evolved from single-agent interactions to swarms of autonomous coding agents working in parallel. Gas Town, Claude Squad, and similar orchestrators enable this paradigm but leave critical gaps:

• —Rate limits fragment across providers with no unified view
• —Cost attribution remains opaque at the agent and task level
• —Provider failover requires manual intervention
• —Monitoring demands constant terminal attention

§ 2. ARCHITECTURE

Turbine implements a non-invasive wrapper pattern. It reads existing state from orchestrator filesystems (Beads JSONL, tmux sessions, git worktrees) without modifying source data. Commands pass through to underlying tools with additional instrumentation.

┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│           TURBINE LAYER             │
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│  rate limiting · cost tracking ·    │
│  provider routing · observability   │
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│         GAS TOWN / BEADS            │
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│     CLAUDE CODE / CODEX / GEMINI    │
└─────────────────────────────────────┘

§ 3. RATE LIMIT ORCHESTRATION

The core innovation is unified rate limit tracking across all configured providers. Turbine maintains a sliding window of API usage, predicts exhaustion, and automatically routes requests to available capacity.

Priority-based routing ensures critical path work receives premium model access while background tasks utilize cost-effective alternatives. Failover is automatic and transparent to the orchestration layer.

§ 4. IMPLEMENTATION

Turbine is implemented as a Node.js CLI with an optional web dashboard. Installation requires no modifications to existing Gas Town or Beads configurations. State is derived entirely from filesystem observation.