awiam

Docs · Source · pip install awiam · The Aither World

The Aither World is an operating system for agents — a Linux you can hand to one, the runtimes it works in, and the tools it works with. awnix is the Linux underneath it; awiam is one of its 33 bricks — each installs on its own, runs offline, and needs no account.

Start here: Deactivate one session and watch it stop working immediately.

Who is this caller? A directory and session store where deactivation is immediate and a corrupt store is never mistaken for an empty one.

pip install awiam

from awiam import Directory, Sessions, Subject

d = Directory("iam.json")
d.put(Subject(id="david", email="d@example.com"))

s = Sessions(d)
token = s.issue("david")

r = s.resolve(token)
if r:
    print(r.subject_id)      # david
else:
    print(r.reason)          # every refusal says why

awiam --store iam.json add david --email d@example.com
awiam --store iam.json issue david
awiam --store iam.json resolve <token>      # 0 resolved · 1 refused · 2 could not judge
awiam --store iam.json deactivate david

The failures it refuses

Everything dangerous in an identity store is a silent success, so each of these is a refusal that names itself:

A session that outlives its account. deactivate() disables the subject and drops their sessions in one operation. Two calls would leave a window where the account is off and the token still resolves — and that window is exactly when someone is being removed for cause.

awiam deactivate david
awiam resolve $TOKEN     # REFUSED: unknown token   (exit 1)

Issuing to a disabled account. Refused at issue(), not only at resolve() — otherwise reactivating the account later revives every token minted while it was off.

A corrupt store reading as an empty one. Directory raises DirectoryUnreadableError rather than returning {}. An empty directory denies everyone while looking perfectly healthy, and a caller that treats absence as "first run" would recreate it and lose every identity. The CLI exits 2, not 1: a refusal is a decision, this is the absence of one.

Tokens in a file that gets copied. Sessions are stored hashed. The store gets backed up, pasted into an issue, copied to a laptop — live tokens in it are credentials in all of those places. Comparison is constant-time; the leak is small, entirely avoidable, and costs one stdlib call.

A session pointing at a subject that vanished. Resolution re-checks the subject every time, so a deleted or disabled account cannot be reached through an old token.

What it deliberately does not do

It does not decide what you may do. That is awbac. It does not hold key material. That is awseal.

package	question
awiam	who is this caller?
awbac	may this subject do X to Y?
awseal	what proves it?

Three packages on purpose. An identity service that also owns authorization has nobody to check it; one that owns its own key material has nobody to attest it. Merging them would be less code and a worse boundary.

Design notes

• No dependencies. An identity check that needs a service to answer fails open the moment that service is unreachable — which is the one time it matters.
• No cache. The store is read fresh per call, deliberately: a cache is a thing that keeps answering after a revocation. Adding one is a design change that must invalidate on revoke, not an optimisation.
• Atomic writes (os.replace), because a torn write loses every identity.

Tests

10 tests, each driving the system into a silent-success state and asserting the refusal — including deactivation killing a live session, a corrupt store raising, and a check that the issued token does not appear in the file.

pip install -e ".[dev]" && pytest

Apache-2.0.

The aw family

Standalone tools that share one idea: replace something you would otherwise have to trust with something you can check.

Each installs on its own, works offline, and needs no account.

	instead of trusting	you check
awdk	a framework's idea of how your agents should run	one loop you can read, pointed at a backend you already pay for
awskills	that an agent knows your procedure	the procedure written down, versioned, and loadable by any agent
awm	that memory stayed in its lane	tenant:user:project scopes, so a write cannot cross a boundary
awnode	a vendor's cloud with every prompt	a local gateway routing to backends you chose
awgraph	that grep found everything	an AST + tree-sitter call graph an agent can traverse
awgit	that no one else is editing this file	a lease, refused at commit time if you do not hold it
awseal	that the artifact came from who you think	an Ed25519 seal — the key that verifies is not the key that forges
awshare	that the download is intact	content-addressed bundles, verified on fetch
awnest	that there is a person on the other end	a verdict with evidence, where "we could not tell" is not "yes"
awnboard	a share link anyone who sees it can use	an invitation addressed to one person, for one gate, revocable
awnix	that the box is what you left it as	an immutable image you built, with atomic rollback
awrecover	that the restore worked	a restore that fully lands or does not land at all
awrelay	a SaaS in the middle of your agents	findings, alerts and coordination over your own transport
awmail	a mailbox somebody else can read	mail your agents send and receive over your own server
awfind	one vendor's idea of the web	results from whichever providers you configured
awbrowse	that the page said what you were told	the render, the DOM and the requests it made
aitherkvcache	a vendor's quantisation defaults	sub-byte KV cache kernels you can benchmark yourself
AitherZero	a pile of scripts nobody has numbered	numbered, discoverable automation with declarative playbooks
AitherConnect	what a page tells your browser to do	a federated search and desktop bridge you host
awreason	a confident paragraph	the phases it went through, and every tool call it made to get there
awrecurse	that everything you pasted in was actually read	which slices it opened, and what it concluded from each
awprism	the first explanation that fits	the ranked alternatives, and the observation that separates them
awrepl	what the agent believes the value is	the value, printed from the live session
awresearch	a summary of pages nobody opened	every claim against the source it came from
awpredict	a model because it trained without erroring	its prediction against a self-updating lookup, on the rows that are actually novel
awkno	that the docs site is up, or that you remember the family	the whole ecosystem in your terminal, with no network at all

awnix is the ground floor — A Linux you can hand to an agent — immutable base, capabilities included.

The Aitherium ecosystem

Every repository here is public. Each publishes an aither-manifest.json beside its page, so any surface can read every sibling's — the network is browsable from any node in it.

repo	what it is	pages
awdk	Build AI agent fleets — 3 lines, any backend, local or cloud	docs
awskills	Portable agent skills — self-contained procedures an agent loads on demand	docs
awm	A portable, scoped agent memory	docs
awnode	A lightweight local gateway — bridges your apps to the AI backends you chose	docs
awrun	A priority-aware queue and dispatcher for agentic runs and ad-hoc CI builds	docs
awgraph	A semantic code graph for agents — AST + tree-sitter, call graphs	docs
awgit	Semantic version control on top of git — edit-ops and leases	docs
awseal	Sign an artifact so a stranger can verify it	docs
awshare	Publish an artifact and fetch it back verified	docs
awdit	An append-only audit trail whose gaps are DETECTABLE	docs
awbac	Role-based access control that fails closed and explains itself	docs
awiam (you are here)	Who is this caller? A directory and session store that fails honestly	docs
awtunnel	Reach a service that has no public address	docs
awnest	Prove there is a human before you let them into the nest	docs
awnboard	A front gate you can put in front of anything, and hand someone the key to	docs
awnix	A Linux you can hand to an agent — immutable base, capabilities included	docs
awrecover	Labelled snapshots with an all-or-nothing restore	docs
awrelay	Portable agent messaging — findings, alerts, coordination	docs
awmail	Give an agent an email address — send, and actually receive	docs
awnet	The agentic web — agents host a mesh, and agents join one	docs
awfind	A portable search client — query, results, ranking	docs
awbrowse	A portable browser client — navigate, console, network, DOM, screenshot	docs
awknowledge	How to run a coding agent so the result survives — the laws, with evidence	docs
aitherkvcache	Near-optimal KV cache quantization for LLM inference — sub-byte compression	docs
AitherZero	PowerShell 7+ automation framework — numbered, self-describing scripts	docs
AitherConnect	Browser extension — federated AI search, page context, and the Living OS overlay	docs
awreason	A portable reasoning client — sessions, phases, thoughts, and the chain that produced the answer	docs
awrecurse	Answer a question over a context far larger than the window — recursively, with the trace kept	docs
awprism	Turn a failure into ranked hypotheses — and say what would confirm each one	docs
awrepl	A REPL an agent can actually use — state that survives between turns	docs
awresearch	Ask a research question, get a cited report you can check	docs
awpredict	Predict what your environment does next, and how surprised you were	docs
awkno	The man page for the Aither World — every brick, stack and law, offline	docs

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