associate

A non-coding agent harness: a fast, reliable worker for read, summarize, and find work across local files and the web. Modelled on the Pi harness, merged from colleague base tools, initially backed by NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning. It takes non-coding tool work off colleague so colleague can focus on coding and thinking.

What you get

• An agent-first CLI cited from teken (afi-cli) — the runtime package has no third-party dependencies.
• A mesh identity — culture.yaml (suffix + backend) and the matching resident prompt file (AGENTS.colleague.md, since this template runs backend: colleague).
• The canonical guildmaster skill kit (11 skills) under .claude/skills/, vendored cite-don't-import. See docs/skill-sources.md.
• A build + deploy baseline — pytest, lint, the agent-first rubric gate, and PyPI Trusted Publishing wired into GitHub Actions.

Quickstart

uv sync
uv run pytest -n auto                 # run the test suite
uv run associate whoami  # identity from culture.yaml
uv run associate learn   # self-teaching prompt (add --json)
uv run teken cli doctor . --strict    # the agent-first rubric gate CI runs

CLI

Every command supports --json. Results go to stdout, errors/diagnostics to stderr (never mixed). Exit codes: 0 success, 1 user error, 2 environment error, 3+ reserved.

Make it your own

1. Rename the package associate/ and the associate CLI/dist name throughout pyproject.toml, the package, tests/, sonar-project.properties, and this README.md. The name is hard-coded in ~100 places, so list every occurrence first — see the git grep discovery command in CLAUDE.md, the authoritative rename procedure.
2. Edit culture.yaml with your suffix and backend.
3. Rewrite CLAUDE.md for your agent and run /init.
4. Re-vendor only the skills you need from guildmaster (see docs/skill-sources.md).

See CLAUDE.md for the full conventions (version-bump-every-PR, the cicd PR lane, deploy setup).

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.