Beam

Beam pools the machines you own into a fleet. From any machine in the fleet you can open a shell on another, run a command there, or send a message that waits until the other machine is online. n10 Desktop uses it to run agents on your other machines.

Machines connect over encrypted tunnels built with tailcat, no Tailscale account needed. One passkey signs every machine into the fleet, and machines find each other through an encrypted directory at beam.n10.is. Shells, commands and messages travel through the tunnels, never through beam.n10.is. When two machines can't connect directly, the tunnel goes through an encrypted relay.

Beam is in beta. The source, the full command reference and the trust model are at github.com/notaharness/beam.

Install

n10 Desktop includes Beam for its Fleet section, so you don't need Beam to use Fleet. The beam command is on the PATH only in terminals and sessions n10 Desktop starts. Install it yourself to use beam from any shell, or on machines without n10 Desktop, such as a headless build box. It runs on macOS and Linux, arm64 and x64.

You need a passkey provider that supports the WebAuthn PRF extension, in a browser or on your phone.

npm install -g @notaharness/beam

Use it

Create the fleet on your first machine, then join each of the others:

beam init --label laptop     # on the first machine: two passkey prompts
beam join --label buildbox   # on every other machine: one passkey prompt

Each prompt opens a browser, or on a headless machine draws a QR code to scan with your phone. After joining, compare the fleet fingerprint that beam join prints with beam status on a machine already in the fleet. They must match.

Then, from any machine:

beam peers                                   # the fleet and who is online
beam connect buildbox                        # a shell on buildbox
beam exec buildbox -- uname -a               # one command, with its exit code
beam msg send buildbox --topic jobs 'ready'  # delivered now, or when buildbox connects
beam msg listen --topic jobs                 # on buildbox: print incoming messages

A shell ends when the connection does, so run long-lived work in tmux: beam connect buildbox -- tmux new-session -A -s agents.

By default every machine in the fleet can run commands as you on every other. Run beam --help for every command, including limiting and revoking machines.

With n10 and Orchestra

n10 Desktop's Fleet section manages the fleet and launches agents on its machines, and Orchestra's scripts take --machine NAME to run a player on one; that machine needs Orchestra installed too.