Mozilla introduces cq, describing it as 'Stack Overflow for agents'

Summary

Mozilla is building cq - described by staff engineer Peter Wilson as "Stack Overflow for agents" - as an open source project to enable AI agents to discover and share collective knowledge. According to Wilson, "agents run into the same issues over and over," causing unnecessary work and token consumption while those issues are diagnosed and fixed. Using cq, the agents would first consult a database of shared knowledge, as well as contributing new solutions. Currently agents can be guided using context files such as agents.md, skill.md or claude.md (for Anthropic's Claude Code), but Wilson argues for "something dynamic, something that earns trust over time rather than relying on static instructions." The code for cq, which is written in Python and is at an exploratory stage, is for local installation and includes plug-ins for Claude Code and OpenCode. The project includes a Docker container to run a Team API for a network, a SQLite database, and an MCP (model context protocol) server. According to the architecture document, knowledge stored in cq has three tiers: local, organization, and "global commons," this last implying some sort of publicly available cq instance. A knowledge unit starts with a low confidence level and no sharing, but this confidence increases as other agents or humans confirm it. Might Mozilla host a public instance of cq? "We've had some conversations internally about a distributed vs. centralized commons, and what each approach could mean for the community," Wilson told us. "Personally speaking, I think it could make sense for Mozilla.ai trying to help bootstrap cq by initially providing a seeded, central platform for folks that want to explore a shared public commons. That said, it needs to be done pragmatically, we want to validate user value as quickly as possible, while being mindful of trade-offs/risk that come along with hosting a central service." Workflow for cq, including agent and human interaction - click to enlarge The project has ...