Show HN: BigBlueBam, MIT-licensed Work OS where agents are first-class coworkers
github.comHi HN, Eddie here. My project BigBlueBam is a self-hosted, MIT-licensed Work OS with a unified backend with native MCP, "AI as Users" rather than bolted-on chat widgets. The deploy script will stand up the full stack (local Docker container or push it to Railway) in about the time it takes to make coffee.
What's live in the build: * Bam (project management/Kanban) * Banter (chat with LiveKit voice/video) * Beacon (knowledge base with a graph view) * Brief (collaborative docs) * Board (infinite canvas whiteboard) * Bolt (workflow automation) * Bearing (goals and OKRs) * Bond (CRM) * Blast (email campaigns) * Bench (analytics and dashboards) * Book (scheduling) * Blank (forms) * Bill (invoicing) * Helpdesk
The architectural bet I cared about most: MCP is the execution substrate for the whole suite, not a "feature". 340 MCP tools (and counting) registered across the apps. Agents and Bolt automations call those tools through the same registry, same auth, same data, and the MCP tools replicate any action a user can take in the UI.
Why I built it: honestly, out of annoyance. I wanted my own ticketing+Kanban and I'd started hacking on that and a Slack-alike in my spare time a while back. Recently I picked several old projects back up with Claude Code and started thinking what I'd do differently if I built them from scratch. MCP integration came up because I’ve been doing a lot of smaller MCP Server work, and I got carried away once I saw how much leverage I was getting from the unified data backend + shared MCP tooling. Once that clicked, each new app in the suite was less work than the last, and agents got more capable with every tool I added.
Try it: git clone, run ./scripts/deploy.bat, (or .sh or .ps1), pick Docker or Railway, answer a few prompts, and you're up in a few minutes. MIT license, full source, no telemetry, no feature gates. If you skip setting up a userid/password during install, it’ll have you create a SuperUser account the first time you hit it.
Railway deployment does have a couple minor notes since their graphql API can’t do everything; You can pick up a detailed overview of how that works in docs/railway-runbook.md
What's rough, and where I'd value feedback:
1. Local Docker won’t set up certs for HTTPS, so MCP tools can only be accessed at http://localhost/… 2. Voice and video in Banter works via LiveKit, but I haven't tested it recently and hasn't been pushed into the corners of the suite where it belongs. Treat it as alpha. My intent is that any collaborative space is calling-enabled, ie., “we’re all in the same room” and less like calling is some special thing that you “do over there”. 3. LiveKit agent layer is skeletal today. The next month is focused on standing up real agent participation in voice and video calls, built on local models (I have a lot of background in voice AI.) 4. Service account management is very new and not as granular as I’d like. This is true for human user management as well. Permissions are fairly coarse. It'll get there. 5. Templates of various kinds need to be reworked. A lot has changed underneath them since they were created. 6. Slack and GitHub integration haven’t been used in anything like Production yet. Slack because Banter replaces it so it's low-p for me, and GitHub because I’ve actually got a LOT more I want to do with it. 7. A suite this size needs real users hammering on it. Synthetic data plus a handful of human testers only catches so much. If you spin it up and break something interesting, raise an Issue. That's the most useful thing anyone can do for me right now.
Stack notes for the curious: Fastify v5, Drizzle, React 19, TanStack Query, Redis, MinIO for files, BullMQ for jobs, LiveKit for WebRTC, Qdrant for vector search (picked over pgvector for hard-delete semantics and built-in RRF), Yjs and Hocuspocus for CRDT in Brief and Board, Turborepo monorepo. Whoa, this is fascinating!
Can't wait to explore the site more and experiment with it. The cross-linking to the channels and tasks are a great feature. The MCP server is really impressive. In general, this shows AI making a lot more sense for companies to integrate than the way it's currently being (under)utilized. Excited to see this grow. Thanks! It's the product of several things for me - one, I hate that everything wants to have its own "Co-pilot" chat interface and am afraid that easy win will turn into a standard. The ideal thing about agents is that they can have responsibilities and you don't have to instruct them constantly. The number of times that I've wanted to ask Gemini to summarize this email for me is closer to zero than 100. So I like MCP for this - agents can have their responsibilities, receive events, take action; if you need to chat with one, you can do that in the same interface you'd chat with a colleague. And the other is that I hate how "voice/video chat" is still "another app". If we're both looking at the same Kanban board, we should just be able to talk without a bunch of negotiation. We're here, online, together in this project, on this app, so why can't we just talk? Give me an icon that lets me talk to anybody that's "in the room" so to speak. It should all be like that, so... it's headed that direction. What, no helpdesk synonym starts with 'b'? Seriously, though, this thing seems very powerful for businesses not tied down by regulatory constraints. I like the idea of 'rooms' and a centralized single chat interface. hah! Yeah - I know... It started just as "helpdesk" and "bam" (because I liked the sound of "Bam!" better than "Ban!" (for Kanban) and I hadn't thought it was going to grow beyond maybe my "Slack Replacement". But once I called it "Banter" it was all downhill from there. While I've tried to keep scaling in mind so huge businesses could use it, I think the real sweet spot for it is smaller distributed workgroups. I'd be less interested in seeing a 20,000 employee company adopt it than 500 companies with 50 employees, each. And I really want to reinvent voice/video "calling". I think "calling" is a weird, old paradigm and rarely needs to be done through its own standalone app. If we're collaborating on the same thing, we should just be able to talk. If we're in the same #channel, we should just be able to talk. I shouldn't need to get in Zoom or Discord or something to chat while we draw on a whiteboard. Huge fan of BigBlueButton! It’s been cool to watch the project go through multiple big tech changes and still keep going. Never give up! Free/Open Source software especially in schools is so important You know... As it turns out, that's a different piece of software! (I was super confused at the comment and had to google it.) My company, and long before that just the website I used to host different projects on, is "BigBlueCeiling" so I tend to default to "BigBlue_________" for project names or offshoots now. I'm a huge fan of FOSS in general though. And if BigBlueBam found life inside of education I wouldn't hate it. This sounds amazing, will look at repo tonight