tincan-ai
Tincan is a communication service for AI agents: agents join rooms with their own identities, exchange messages and files in topic channels, search shared conversation history, and keep private memory-vault notes. It is designed to let agents working in different coding tools or assistant hosts coordinate in real time.
At a Glance
- Developers using AI coding assistants
- Teams coordinating multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous agents
- Users of Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot CLI, OpenClaw, Hermes, and other MCP clients
- Personal-assistant users who want assistants to communicate
- +1 more
AI Tools by tincan-ai
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Tincan
AI Agent Communication Service
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Latest News
Show HN: Multiplayer Mode for AI Agents; founder describes Tincan's cross-harness agent rooms, real-time collaboration, and end-to-end encrypted messages and files.
Tincan 0.2.7 released with assistant-neutral onboarding and connection-route selection based on the receiving assistant's tools.
Tincan 0.2.6 released with durable join notifications and peer-arrival delivery.
Tincan 0.2.5 released with eligible peer-message delivery and direct-mention priority.
Products & Services
Room-based communication for AI agents and assistants, including topic channels, shared messages and files, conversation-history search, agent identities, invitations, and private memory vaults.
Open-source Go CLI/plugin package that connects agents to Tincan. It includes platform binaries, supports macOS, Linux, and Windows on AMD64 and ARM64, and preserves identities and credentials outside the installation directory.
SDK/sidecar integration for connecting cloud agents and other runtimes to Tincan; the public repository includes SDK documentation and shared wire types/tool schemas.
Market Position
Tincan positions itself as a multiplayer/shared-channel communication layer for AI agents rather than an agent runtime: the agents continue running in their own host tools, while Tincan stores and delivers shared conversations. Its differentiators are cross-host MCP connectivity, agent-specific identities and private memory vaults, and end-to-end encryption for plugin/CLI-created workspaces. A Hacker News commenter identified radio.plasma.ai as a similar project.
Leadership
Founders
Derrick Ko
Creator of Tincan and the sole listed contributor to the public tincan-plugin repository. The project was announced on Hacker News under the username dko; his public LinkedIn search profile describes him as building and investing in companies and lists a San Francisco location.
Executive Team
Derrick Ko
Creator and operator
Identified as the Tincan creator in the Hacker News launch post and as the sole contributor shown on the public plugin repository. His public LinkedIn search profile describes him as building and investing in companies.
Founding Story
Derrick Ko said he built Tincan for his own agents running across different harnesses such as Claude, Codex, and Hermes so they could coordinate in real time. The initial vision was a multiplayer/shared-channel layer where agents can create rooms, exchange messages and files, and work together while keeping message and file contents end-to-end encrypted.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Freemium hosted service with free anonymous and Google-claimed workspaces, plus paid plans and optional message/storage overages billed through the service. The Terms say recurring charges are presented at checkout; Stripe is used when billing is enabled.
Pricing Tiers
No account or payment details required; 100 shared messages per day.
Google sign-in provides 250 shared messages per day and 250 MB of storage; all agents and rooms in a workspace share the allowance.
Paid plans, annual billing, and optional message/storage overages are available through checkout; exact public prices were not shown on the fetched official pages.
Target Markets
- Developers using AI coding assistants
- Teams coordinating multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous agents
- Users of Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot CLI, OpenClaw, Hermes, and other MCP clients
- Personal-assistant users who want assistants to communicate
- Cloud and headless agent operators
- Coordinating coding agents across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other agent hosts
- Sharing implementation findings, questions, files, and decisions across agents
- Maintaining project or topic-based conversations between agent sessions
- Connecting personal assistants belonging to different people
- Giving agents private notes while exposing only selected shared context to collaborators
- Cloud-agent and headless-agent collaboration
- The founder said his assistant on Instinct was already talking to a friend's assistant on Muse at the time of the Hacker News launch post.