Metis

Metis (μῆτις) — distributed cognitive layer over any LLM
Part of the alexar76 AI agent economy

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Multi-agent reasoning orchestrator — Understanding Council, DGPD depth gating, layered MoA, verifier, memory, search, economy metering, distributed cluster, MCP tools, and OpenAI-compatible API.

Quick start

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev,distributed]"
ollama pull qwen3:8b
metis "Explain multi-agent systems" --model qwen3:8b --url http://localhost:11434/v1

Install

PyPI package name is aimarket-metis (the PyPI name metis is a different project). Import path and CLI stay metis, metis-serve, etc.

# PyPI
pip install aimarket-metis
pip install "aimarket-metis[dev,distributed]"

# GitHub release tag
pip install "aimarket-metis[distributed] @ git+https://github.com/alexar76/metis.git@v0.2.0"

# Clone / monorepo (editable)
git clone https://github.com/alexar76/metis.git && cd metis
pip install -e ".[dev,distributed]"

# Docker
docker compose up -d

Documentation index

Ecosystem map

CLI commands

Architecture

flowchart LR
    Q["Query"] --> M["Metis"]
    M --> R["Router"]
    R --> C["Council/MoA/Agent"]
    C --> P["LLM Providers"]
    C --> T["Tools + MCP"]
    M --> E["Economy Meter"]

Jury verification (/v1/verify)

By default a /v1/verify verdict is written by one model and audited by one model — the base model on fast, the MoA aggregator on council. That is the verdict the AIMarket hub's Pay-on-Verified escrow moves money on, so a seller only has to fool one lineage. A jury makes it a vote across vendors:

jury_default_for_verify: true   # every /v1/verify goes to the jury; off → only route: "jury"
jury_min_vendors: 3             # and every seat must be a different vendor
jury_models:
  - {model: deepseek-v4-pro, base_url: https://api.deepseek.com/v1, api_key_env: DEEPSEEK_API_KEY}
  - {model: minimax/minimax-m3, base_url: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1, api_key_env: OPENROUTER_API_KEY}
  - {model: z-ai/glm-5.3, base_url: https://openrouter.ai/api/v1, api_key_env: OPENROUTER_API_KEY}

Ready rosters for both courts are in deploy/prod.jury.example.yaml.

What the jury does, and what it promises:

• The caller's prompt goes to every juror unchanged, in parallel, at jury_temperature (0.1). A juror slower than jury_timeout_seconds abstains; it does not hold the jury.
• A juror's vote counts only if it states {"fulfils": bool, "score": 0–1} consistently at the caller's bar and — when the request carries audit_id — echoes that id. A juror that parroted a verdict planted in the audited text has not voted.
• A side wins with a strict majority of the whole roster; abstentions count against agreement. verify_score = agreement × median confidence of the winning side (confidence in "fulfils" = score, in "does not fulfil" = 1 − score), so a confident unanimous conviction is a trusted audit.
• answer is one winning juror's verdict object on its own, so a consumer's parser reads it unchanged. A split carries no verdict object (indeterminate); every seat failing is status: "error" (retry), never a verdict.
• The envelope adds jury ([{model, vendor, fulfils, score, latency_ms, abstained?}]), jury_outcome (pass|fail|split|unavailable), jury_agreement and input_flags.injection_suspected. The trace resolves at /v1/traces/{trace_id}.
• Injection-looking text is flagged, not blocked on this path: the audited text is written by the parties with money on the verdict, and a hard block would hand either of them an indeterminate outcome on demand.

Know the arithmetic before sizing a roster: at the hub's 0.7 bar a 3-seat jury settles only when unanimous (2/3 × anything < 0.7); five seats tolerate one confident dissent; an even roster only adds splits. The jurors are independent labs, not independent infrastructure — seats behind one gateway share its outages and its account.

The same change stops the capability gate from seating one model as both the writer and the auditor of a verdict: with judge_distinct_vendor: true (default) the judge avoids the vendors of the base model and the MoA aggregator, an explicit modules.judge that clears min_aggregator_capability is honoured instead of silently overridden, and min_unique_council_vendors extends the diversity check from (model, endpoint) pairs to vendors, for the MoA seats as well as the council. metis validate warns when the judge still shares a vendor with a writer.

Running a second instance as the appeal court

The hub's appeal path (AIMARKET_APPEAL_WINDOW_S) re-judges a disputed verdict on a second, independent Metis. Independence is operational, so it has to be set up that way:

1. Another host. Not the first instance's machine (shared failure, shared operator access) and not a host holding a hot wallet. Same image, its own container.
2. A disjoint jury. The metis_2 roster in deploy/prod.jury.example.yaml shares no vendor with metis_1 (a test enforces it). Use a second OpenRouter key with its own spend cap — vendor-disjoint seats behind one key still share that key's quota.
3. Its own identity. Its own METIS_API_KEY (setting it makes /v1/verify require the Bearer), handed to the hub as AIMARKET_APPEAL_METIS_KEY; its own AIMARKET_APPEAL_METIS_URL; and a distinct AIMARKET_APPEAL_VERIFIER_ID (e.g. metis.appeal@v1) so every envelope and receipt names which court decided.
4. Nothing from the first instance. It gets the stored intent and delivery, a fresh audit id and the appellant's fenced statement — never the first verdict, its score, its reasons or its trace. Do not point it at the first instance's trace store or knowledge store.

docker run -d --name metis-appeal --restart unless-stopped -p 127.0.0.1:8081:8080 \
  -e METIS_API_KEY=<appeal-court key> -e OPENROUTER_API_KEY=<second, capped key> \
  -v /opt/metis-appeal/prod.yaml:/app/config/prod.yaml:ro -v /opt/metis-appeal/data:/app/data \
  metis:latest metis-serve --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080 --config /app/config/prod.yaml

Production

export METIS_API_KEY=sk-...
metis-serve --config config.production.yaml --production --port 8080

Legacy env vars SUPERBRAIN_* and COGNITIVE_* are still read for one release cycle.

Docker

cp config/docker.env.example .env
docker compose up -d --build

Tests

pytest --cov=metis --cov-report=term-missing -v

Research citations

Design decisions are grounded in published work — see docs/en/RESEARCH.md for Yang et al. 2026 (heterogeneous agents), Wang et al. ICLR 2025 (layered MoA), and related citations with honest caveats.

MIT License