freedom of information · freedom of patterns · creating freely · open-weights
libertad de informacion · crear libremente · creer librement · liberte d'expression
Freiheit der Muster · jiyuu ni souzou suru · jayuroun changjak · svoboda tvorchestva
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vrij creeren · tworz swobodnie · dimiourgia elefthera · khuli soch
hurriyat al-ibdaa · code is poetry · democratize AI · imagine freely

Open Agents

npm i -g open-agents-ai && oa

AI coding agent powered entirely by open-weight models. No API keys. No cloud. Your code never leaves your machine.

An autonomous multi-turn tool-calling agent that reads your code, makes changes, runs tests, and fixes failures in an iterative loop until the task is complete. First launch auto-detects your hardware and configures the optimal model with expanded context window automatically.

Features

• 47 autonomous tools — file I/O, shell, grep, web search/fetch/crawl, memory (read/write/search), sub-agents, background tasks, image/OCR/PDF, git, diagnostics, vision, desktop automation, structured files, code sandbox, transcription, skills
• Moondream vision — see and interact with the desktop via Moondream VLM (caption, query, detect, point-and-click)
• Desktop automation — vision-guided clicking: describe a UI element in natural language, the agent finds and clicks it
• Auto-install desktop deps — screenshot, mouse, OCR, and image tools auto-install missing system packages (scrot, xdotool, tesseract, imagemagick) on first use
• Parallel tool execution — read-only tools run concurrently via Promise.allSettled
• Sub-agent delegation — spawn independent agents for parallel workstreams
• Ralph Loop — iterative task execution that keeps retrying until completion criteria are met
• Dream Mode — creative idle exploration modeled after real sleep architecture (NREM→REM cycles)
• Live Listen — bidirectional voice communication with real-time Whisper transcription
• Neural TTS — hear what the agent is doing via GLaDOS or Overwatch ONNX voices
• Human expert speed ratio — real-time Exp: Nx gauge comparing agent speed to a leading human expert, calibrated across 47 tool baselines
• Cost tracking — real-time token cost estimation for 15+ cloud providers
• Work evaluation — LLM-as-judge scoring with task-type-specific rubrics
• Session metrics — track turns, tool calls, tokens, files modified, tasks completed per session
• Structured file generation — create CSV, TSV, JSON, Markdown tables, and Excel-compatible files
• Code sandbox — isolated code execution in subprocess or Docker (JS, Python, Bash, TypeScript)
• Structured file reading — parse CSV, TSV, JSON, Markdown tables with binary format detection
• Multi-provider web search — DuckDuckGo (free), Tavily (structured), Jina AI (markdown) with auto-detection
• Web crawling — multi-page web scraping with Crawlee/Playwright for deep documentation extraction
• Task templates — specialized system prompts and tool recommendations for code, document, analysis, plan tasks
• Auto-expanding context — detects RAM/VRAM and creates an optimized model variant on first run
• Mid-task steering — type while the agent works to add context without interrupting
• Smart compaction — 6 context compaction strategies (default, aggressive, decisions, errors, summary, structured) with research-backed design
• Memex experience archive — large tool outputs archived during compaction with hash-based retrieval
• Persistent memory — learned patterns stored in .oa/memory/ across sessions
• Session context persistence — auto-saves context on task completion, manual /context save|restore across sessions
• Self-learning — auto-fetches docs from the web when encountering unfamiliar APIs
• Seamless /update — in-place update and reload with automatic context save/restore
• Task control — /pause (gentle halt at turn boundary), /stop (immediate kill), /resume to continue
• Model-tier awareness — dynamic tool sets, prompt complexity, and context limits scale with model size (small/medium/large)

How It Works

You: oa "fix the null check in auth.ts"

Agent: [Turn 1] file_read(src/auth.ts)
       [Turn 2] grep_search(pattern="null", path="src/auth.ts")
       [Turn 3] file_edit(old_string="if (user)", new_string="if (user != null)")
       [Turn 4] shell(command="npm test")
       [Turn 5] task_complete(summary="Fixed null check — all tests pass")

The agent uses tools autonomously in a loop — reading errors, fixing code, and re-running validation until the task succeeds or the turn limit is reached.

Ralph Loop — Iteration-First Design

The Ralph Loop is the core execution philosophy: iteration beats perfection. Instead of trying to get everything right on the first attempt, the agent executes in a retry loop where errors become learning data rather than session-ending failures.

/ralph "fix all failing tests" --completion "npm test passes with 0 failures"
/ralph "migrate to TypeScript" --completion "npx tsc --noEmit exits 0" --max-iterations 20
/ralph "reach 80% coverage" --completion "coverage report shows >80%" --timeout 120

Each iteration:

1. Execute — make changes based on the task + all accumulated learnings
2. Verify — run the completion command (tests, build, lint, coverage)
3. Learn — if verification fails, extract what went wrong and why
4. Iterate — retry with the new knowledge until passing or limits reached

The loop tracks iteration history, generates completion reports saved to .aiwg/ralph/, and supports resume/abort for interrupted sessions. Safety bounds (max iterations, timeout) prevent runaway loops.

/ralph-status     # Check current/previous loop status
/ralph-resume     # Resume interrupted loop
/ralph-abort      # Cancel running loop

Context Compaction — Research-Backed Memory Management

Long conversations consume context window tokens. Open Agents uses progressive context compaction to compress older messages while preserving critical information — decisions, errors, file states, and task progress.

How It Works

Compaction triggers automatically when estimated token usage reaches 75% of the model's context window. The system:

1. Preserves the system prompt and initial user task (head messages)
2. Summarizes middle messages (tool calls, results, exploration) into a structured digest
3. Keeps recent messages verbatim (scaled by model tier and context size)
4. Archives large tool outputs to the Memex experience archive (retrievable by hash ID via memex_retrieve)

Compaction Strategies

Six strategies are available via /compact <strategy>:

Automatic Compaction

Compaction thresholds scale dynamically with model size:

Memex Experience Archive

During compaction, large tool outputs (file reads, grep results, command output) are archived with a short hash ID. The agent can recover any archived result using memex_retrieve:

Agent: memex_retrieve(id="a3f2c1")
       → [Full original content of the archived tool result]

This gives the agent "perfect recall" of any prior tool output despite compaction.

Design Rationale

The compaction system draws on several research findings:

• RECOMP (arXiv:2310.04408, ICLR 2024) — Demonstrated that retrieved context can be compressed to 6% of original size with minimal quality loss. Our observation masking pre-pass applies this principle to tool outputs.
• Tool Documentation Enables Zero-Shot Tool-Usage (arXiv:2308.00675) — Showed that documentation quality matters more than example quantity. Our compaction preserves tool schemas while discarding verbose results.
• ToolLLM DFSDT (arXiv:2307.16789) — Validated that backtracking and error preservation improve multi-step task success by +35pp. Our error-preserving strategy directly implements this insight.
• Long Context Does Not Solve Planning (NATURAL PLAN, arXiv:2406.04520) — GPT-4 achieves only 31% on trip planning even with full context. This confirms that efficient context use outperforms naive context expansion, motivating aggressive compaction with selective preservation.

Domain-Aware Preservation

Compaction summaries include:

• Task state — current phase, goals, progress, blockers
• File registry — per-file metadata (last action, line count, purpose) for files touched during the session
• Memex index — hash IDs and one-line summaries of archived tool outputs

This ensures the agent can resume coherently after compaction without re-reading files or re-running commands.

Task Control

Pause, Stop, Resume, Destroy

Session Context Persistence

Context is automatically saved on every task completion and preserved across /update restarts.

/context save      # Force-save current session context
/context restore   # Load previous session context into next task
/context show      # Show saved context status (entries, last saved)

The system maintains a rolling window of the last 20 session entries in .oa/context/session-context.json. When you run /context restore, the last 10 entries are formatted into a restore prompt and injected into your next task, giving the agent continuity across sessions.

During /update, context is automatically saved before the process restarts and restored when the new version resumes your task.

Auto-Restore on Startup

When you launch oa in a workspace that has saved session context from a previous run, you'll be prompted to restore it:

ℹ Previous session found (5 entries, last active 2h ago)
ℹ Last task: fix the auth bug in src/middleware.ts
ℹ Restore previous context? (y/n)
❯ y
ℹ Context restored from 5 session(s). Will be injected into your next task.

Type y to restore — the previous session context will be prepended to your next task, giving the agent full continuity. Type n (or anything else) to start fresh. The prompt only appears on fresh starts, not on /update resumes (which auto-restore context).

Dream Mode — Creative Idle Exploration

When you're not actively tasking the agent, Dream Mode lets it creatively explore your codebase and generate improvement proposals autonomously. The system models real human sleep architecture with four stages per cycle:

Each cycle expands through all four stages then contracts (evaluation, pruning of weak ideas). Three modes control how far the agent can go:

/dream              # Default — read-only exploration, proposals saved to .oa/dreams/
/dream deep         # Multi-cycle deep exploration with expansion/contraction phases
/dream lucid        # Full implementation — saves workspace backup, then implements,
                    #   tests, evaluates, and self-plays each proposal with checkpoints
/dream stop         # Wake up — stop dreaming

Default and Deep modes are completely safe — the agent can only read your code and write proposals to .oa/dreams/. File writes, edits, and shell commands outside that directory are blocked by sandboxed dream tools.

Lucid mode unlocks full write access. Before making changes, it saves a workspace checkpoint so you can roll back. Each cycle goes: dream → implement → test → evaluate → checkpoint → next cycle.

All proposals are indexed in .oa/dreams/PROPOSAL-INDEX.md for easy review.

Listen Mode — Live Bidirectional Audio

Listen mode enables real-time voice communication with the agent. Your microphone audio is captured, streamed through Whisper, and the transcription is injected directly into the input line — creating a hands-free coding workflow.

Two transcription backends ensure broad platform support:

• transcribe-cli (faster-whisper / ONNX) — used by default, fastest on x86
• openai-whisper (Python venv) — automatic fallback for ARM, linux-arm64, or when ONNX is unavailable. Auto-creates a venv and installs deps on first use.

/listen             # Toggle microphone capture on/off
/listen auto        # Auto-submit after 3 seconds of silence (hands-free)
/listen confirm     # Require Enter to submit transcription (default)
/listen stop        # Stop listening

Model selection — choose the Whisper model size for your hardware:

/listen tiny        # Fastest, least accurate (~39MB)
/listen base        # Good balance (~74MB)
/listen small       # Better accuracy (~244MB)
/listen medium      # High accuracy (~769MB)
/listen large       # Best accuracy, slower (~1.5GB)

When combined with /voice, you get full bidirectional audio — speak your tasks, hear the agent's progress through TTS, and speak corrections mid-task. The status bar shows a blinking red ● REC indicator with a countdown timer during auto-mode recording.

Platform support:

• Linux x86: arecord (ALSA) or ffmpeg (PulseAudio) + transcribe-cli
• Linux ARM: arecord or ffmpeg + openai-whisper (auto-installed in Python venv)
• macOS: sox (CoreAudio) or ffmpeg (AVFoundation)

The transcribe-cli dependency auto-installs in the background on first use. On ARM or when transcribe-cli fails, the system automatically falls back to openai-whisper via a self-managed Python venv (same approach used by Moondream vision).

File transcription: Drag-and-drop audio/video files (.mp3, .wav, .mp4, .mkv, etc.) onto the terminal to transcribe them. Results are saved to .oa/transcripts/.

Vision & Desktop Automation (Moondream)

Open Agents can see your screen, understand UI elements, and interact with desktop applications through natural language — powered by the Moondream vision language model running entirely locally.

Desktop Awareness

The agent can take a screenshot and describe what's on screen:

You: what's on my desktop right now?

Agent: [Turn 1] desktop_describe()
       → "A Linux desktop showing three terminal windows with code editors,
          a file manager in the background, and a taskbar at the bottom
          with Firefox, Files, and Terminal icons."

Ask specific questions about the screen:

Agent: [Turn 1] desktop_describe(question="What application is in focus?")
       → "The focused application is a terminal running vim with a Python file open."

Vision Analysis

Analyze any image with four actions:

Agent: vision(image="screenshot.png", action="caption")
       → "A terminal window displaying code with syntax highlighting"

Agent: vision(image="ui.png", action="query", prompt="How many buttons are visible?")
       → "There are 4 buttons visible: Save, Cancel, Help, and Close"

Agent: vision(image="ui.png", action="detect", prompt="button")
       → Detected 4 "button" in ui.png:
         1. bbox: [0.10, 0.85, 0.25, 0.95]
         2. bbox: [0.30, 0.85, 0.45, 0.95]
         ...

Agent: vision(image="ui.png", action="point", prompt="close button")
       → Found 1 "close button" at (0.95, 0.02) — pixel (1824, 22)

Point-and-Click

Describe what to click in plain English — the agent screenshots, finds the element with Moondream, and clicks it:

Agent: desktop_click(target="the Save button")
       → Clicked "Save button" at (480, 920)

Agent: desktop_click(target="File menu", button="left")
       → Clicked "File menu" at (45, 12)

Agent: desktop_click(target="terminal icon", click_type="double")
       → Clicked "terminal icon" at (1850, 540)

Supports left/right/middle click, single/double click, multi-match selection by index, dry-run mode for verification, and configurable delay for UI transitions.

Setup

Moondream runs locally — no API keys, no cloud, your screen data never leaves your machine:

# Create a Python venv and install Moondream Station
python3 -m venv .moondream-venv
.moondream-venv/bin/pip install moondream-station pydantic uvicorn fastapi packaging

# Start the vision server (downloads model on first run, ~1.7GB)
.moondream-venv/bin/python packages/execution/scripts/start-moondream.py

The vision tools auto-detect a running Moondream Station on localhost:2020. For cloud inference, set MOONDREAM_API_KEY instead.

System dependencies (auto-installed on first use):

Desktop tools automatically install missing system packages when first needed. No manual setup required — just use the tool and it handles the rest:

Supports apt (Debian/Ubuntu), dnf (Fedora), pacman (Arch), and brew (macOS). You can also pre-install everything at once:

./scripts/setup-desktop.sh          # Install all desktop deps
./scripts/setup-desktop.sh --check-only  # Just check what's missing

Vision backend:

• Moondream Station (local) — runs entirely on your machine, no API keys needed
• Moondream Cloud API — set MOONDREAM_API_KEY for cloud inference

Interactive TUI

Launch without arguments to enter the interactive REPL:

oa

The TUI features an animated multilingual phrase carousel, live metrics bar with pastel-colored labels (token in/out, context window usage, human expert speed ratio, cost), rotating tips, syntax-highlighted tool output, and dynamic terminal-width cropping.

Slash Commands

All settings commands accept --local to save to project .oa/settings.json instead of global config.

Mid-Task Steering

While the agent is working (shown by the + prompt), type to add context:

> fix the auth bug
  ⎿  Read: src/auth.ts
+ also check the session handling        ← typed while agent works
  ↪ Context added: also check the session handling
  ⎿  Search: session
  ⎿  Edit: src/auth.ts

Tools (47)

Read-only tools execute concurrently when called in the same turn. Mutating tools run sequentially.

Auto-Expanding Context Window

On startup and /model switch, Open Agents detects your RAM/VRAM and creates an optimized model variant:

Model-Tier Awareness

Open Agents classifies models into three tiers and adapts its behavior accordingly:

Tool Nesting for Small Models

Small models use an explore_tools meta-tool pattern inspired by hierarchical API retrieval research (ToolLLM, arXiv:2307.16789). Instead of presenting all 47 tools (which overwhelms small context windows), only 6 core tools are loaded initially:

• file_read, file_write, file_edit, shell, task_complete, explore_tools

The agent can call explore_tools() to see a catalog of additional tools with one-line descriptions, then explore_tools(enable="grep_search") to unlock specific tools as needed. This reduces tool schema tokens by ~80% while preserving access to the full toolset.

This approach is substantiated by:

• Gorilla (arXiv:2305.15334) — 7B model with retrieval outperforms GPT-4 on tool-calling hallucination rate
• DFSDT (arXiv:2307.16789) — ToolLLaMA-7B with depth-first search scored 66.7%, approaching GPT-4's 70.4%
• Octopus v2 (arXiv:2404.01744) — 2B model achieved 99.5% function-calling accuracy with context-efficient tool encoding

Dynamic Context Limits

All context-dependent values scale automatically with the actual context window size:

Voice Feedback (TTS)

/voice              # Toggle on/off (default: GLaDOS)
/voice glados       # GLaDOS voice
/voice overwatch    # Overwatch voice

Auto-downloads the ONNX voice model (~50MB) on first use. Install espeak-ng for best quality (apt install espeak-ng / brew install espeak-ng).

Human Expert Speed Ratio

The status bar displays a real-time Exp: Nx gauge estimating how fast the agent is working relative to a leading human expert performing equivalent tasks.

In: 12,345 | Out: 4,567 | Ctx: 18,000/131,072 86% | Exp: 4.2x | Cost: $0.34
                                                       ^^^^^^^^
                                                    Agent is 4.2x faster
                                                    than a human expert

How It Works

Each tool call maps to a calibrated expert baseline time — the estimated seconds a top-tier human developer would take to perform the equivalent operation manually:

Additional overhead per action:

• +5s context-switch per tool call (expert switching between tools)
• +15s planning per reasoning turn (expert thinking about next step)

The ratio accumulates across all tasks in the session:

speedRatio = totalHumanExpertTime / totalAgentWallClockTime

Color coding: green (2x+ faster), yellow (1-2x, comparable), red (<1x, slower than expert).

All 47 tools have calibrated baselines ranging from 3s (task_stop) to 180s (codebase_map). Unknown tools default to 20s.

Cost Tracking & Session Metrics

Real-time token cost estimation for cloud providers. The status bar shows running cost when using a paid endpoint.

/cost              # Show cost breakdown by model/provider
/stats             # Session metrics: turns, tool calls, tokens, files modified
/evaluate          # Score the last completed task (LLM-as-judge, 5 rubric dimensions)

Cost tracking supports 15+ providers including Groq, Together AI, OpenRouter, Fireworks AI, DeepInfra, Mistral, Cerebras, and more. Pricing is per-million tokens with separate input/output rates.

Work evaluation uses five task-type-specific rubrics (code, document, analysis, plan, general) scoring correctness, completeness, efficiency, code quality, and communication on a 1-5 scale.

Code Sandbox

Execute code snippets in isolated environments without affecting your project:

Agent: code_sandbox(language="python", code="import math; print(math.factorial(20))")
       → 2432902008176640000

Agent: code_sandbox(language="javascript", code="console.log([...new Set([1,2,2,3])].length)")
       → 3

Supports JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, and Bash. Two execution modes:

• Subprocess (default) — runs in a child process with timeout and output limits
• Docker — runs in an isolated container when docker is available

Structured Data Tools

Generate structured files

Create CSV, TSV, JSON, Markdown tables, and Excel-compatible files from data:

Agent: structured_file(format="csv", path="results.csv", columns=["name","score"],
         data=[{"name":"Alice","score":95},{"name":"Bob","score":87}])
       → Created results.csv (2 rows, 2 columns)

Read structured files

Parse existing data files with automatic format detection:

Agent: read_structured_file(path="data.csv")
       → CSV: 150 rows, 5 columns [showing first 100]

Agent: read_structured_file(path="report.md")
       → Markdown: 3 table(s) extracted

Detects binary formats (XLSX, PDF, DOCX) and suggests conversion tools.

Multi-Provider Web Search

Web search automatically selects the best available provider:

export TAVILY_API_KEY=tvly-...   # Enable Tavily (optional)
export JINA_API_KEY=jina_...     # Enable Jina AI (optional)

Task Templates

Set a task type to get specialized system prompts, recommended tools, and output guidance:

/task-type code       # Code generation/fix — emphasizes tests, diffs, file edits
/task-type document   # Documentation — emphasizes clarity, structure, completeness
/task-type analysis   # Analysis tasks — emphasizes data, metrics, evidence
/task-type plan       # Planning — emphasizes steps, dependencies, risks

Configuration

Config priority: CLI flags > env vars > ~/.open-agents/config.json > defaults.

open-agents config set model qwen3.5:122b
open-agents config set backendUrl http://localhost:11434

Project Context

Create AGENTS.md, OA.md, or .open-agents.md in your project root for agent instructions. Context files merge from parent to child directories.

.oa/ Project Directory

.oa/
├── config.json        # Project config overrides
├── settings.json      # TUI settings (model, endpoint, voice, stream, etc.)
├── memory/            # Persistent memory store (topics, patterns, facts)
├── dreams/            # Dream mode proposals & checkpoints
├── transcripts/       # Audio/video transcriptions
├── index/             # Cached codebase index
├── context/           # Session context persistence
│   └── session-context.json  # Rolling 20-entry context window
├── session/           # Compaction summaries for crash recovery
├── history/           # Session history
└── pending-task.json  # Saved task state for /stop and /update resume

Model Support

Primary target: Qwen3.5-122B-A10B via Ollama (MoE, 48GB+ VRAM)

Any Ollama or OpenAI-compatible API model with tool calling works:

oa --model qwen2.5-coder:32b "fix the bug"
oa --backend vllm --backend-url http://localhost:8000/v1 "add tests"
oa --backend-url http://10.0.0.5:11434 "refactor auth"

Supported Inference Providers

Open Agents auto-detects your provider from the endpoint URL and configures auth + health checks accordingly. All providers use standard Authorization: Bearer <key> authentication.

Connecting to a Provider

Use /endpoint in the TUI or pass via CLI:

# Chutes AI
/endpoint https://llm.chutes.ai --auth cpk_your_key_here

# Groq
/endpoint https://api.groq.com/openai --auth gsk_your_key_here

# Together AI
/endpoint https://api.together.xyz --auth your_key_here

# Self-hosted vLLM on LAN
/endpoint http://10.0.0.5:8000

The agent auto-detects the provider, normalizes the URL (strips /v1/chat/completions if pasted), tests connectivity, and saves the configuration. You can paste full endpoint URLs — they'll be cleaned up automatically.

Evaluation Suite

40 evaluation tasks test the agent's autonomous capabilities across coding, web research, SDLC analysis, tool creation, multi-file reasoning, and memory systems:

node eval/run-agentic.mjs                          # Run all tasks
node eval/run-agentic.mjs 04-add-test              # Single task
node eval/run-agentic.mjs --model qwen2.5-coder:32b  # Different model

Tasks 31-33 are designed for small model (≤9B) evaluation using file_edit patterns. Tasks 34-40 test the memory system (read/write/search) and tool discovery.

Benchmark Results

Qwen3.5-122B: 100% pass rate (37/37 tasks, including memory tasks 34-40)
Qwen3.5-27B:  100% pass rate (30/30 tasks)
Qwen3.5-9B:   100% pass rate (tasks 31-33, file_edit-optimized)
              71% pass rate (5/7 memory tasks 34-40)

The eval runner includes model-tier-aware features: automatic tool set filtering, HTTP 500 recovery with file_edit hints, loop detection with tool banning, and tier-based output truncation.

AIWG Integration

Open Agents integrates with AIWG for AI-augmented software development:

npm i -g aiwg
oa "analyze this project's SDLC health and set up documentation"

Architecture

The core is AgenticRunner — a multi-turn tool-calling loop with context management:

User task → System prompt + tools → LLM → tool_calls → Execute → Feed results → LLM
                                          ↓                                      ↑
                                    Compaction check ─── Memex archive ─── Context restore
                                          (repeat until task_complete or max turns)

• Tool-first — the model explores via tools, not pre-stuffed context
• Iterative — tests, sees failures, fixes them
• Parallel-safe — read-only tools concurrent, mutating tools sequential
• Observable — every tool call and result emitted as a real-time event
• Bounded — max turns, timeout, output limits prevent runaway loops
• Context-aware — dynamic compaction, Memex archiving, session persistence, model-tier scaling
• Brute-force — optional auto re-engagement when turn limit is hit (keeps going until task_complete or user abort)

License

MIT