bos-ai 1.3.0

Lightweight single-file agent framework

BOS AI

Lightweight, extensible infrastructure for building agentic systems in Python.

bos-ai is an actor-based framework for running LLM-driven agents with explicit message routing, configurable runtime boundaries, and a small core. It is meant to be shaped into different kinds of agentic systems rather than forcing one opinionated product workflow.

What It Is

• Fully configurable: agents, tools, skills, memories, channels, runtime, and storage are configured in TOML and wired through extension points.
• Actor-based: agents communicate through a MailRoute plus bound MailBox capabilities instead of direct in-process coupling.
• Built for composition: the same core can back a local TUI, an HTTP/WebSocket endpoint, or a Telegram bot. Server-side chat cursors let one client resume threads created from another client.
• Small core, explicit boundaries: contracts, defaults, harness lifecycle, runtime orchestration, and extensions are kept separate.

Privacy

BOS AI does not ship with built-in telemetry, analytics, or hosted data collection. Your privacy boundary is defined by the models, tools, channels, and storage backends you configure.

If you use your own local or self-hosted model and keep your channels and storage local, BOS AI itself does not require sending your data to any BOS-owned service.

Quickstart

Install the package:

pip install bos-ai

Initialize a workspace:

mkdir my-agent
cd my-agent
boscli init

Start the agent runtime:

boscli gateway start

Connect the built-in TUI:

boscli tui

Useful lifecycle commands:

boscli gateway status
boscli gateway restart
boscli gateway stop

Workspace Model

Each workspace gets a .bos/config.toml. BOS AI searches upward from the current directory for .bos/config.toml. If no workspace-local .bos exists, set BOS_DIR explicitly. If both an ancestor .bos and BOS_DIR are present but point to different locations, BOS AI fails with an ambiguity error instead of silently choosing one.

Agent definitions may stay inline in .bos/config.toml or be placed in external directories. By default, .bos/agents/ is auto-scanned. To customize the scan locations:

[platform]
agent_dirs = ["agents", "../shared-agents", "~/.bos/agents", "/opt/agents"]

Relative paths are resolved against .bos/; absolute paths and ~ are supported. External agents are <dir>/<name>.toml files or <dir>/<name>.md files. For Markdown agents, optional YAML-style frontmatter supplies settings such as name, description, tools, and exclude_tools; the Markdown body is the system_prompt. If name is provided in the file it is used as-is; if omitted, the name is derived from the filename stem. Inline agents load first, external agents load second (alphabetically within each directory, directories processed in list order), exact-name duplicates are last-wins, and case-only collisions are errors. Workspace.config stays as the raw manifest, and runtime-facing agent config is produced through a resolved platform view.

For the full rule set and resolver behavior, see docs/architecture/config-workspace.md.

By default, the primary actor is addressed as agent@main. The selected main agent implementation is configured separately under [main].agent.

Example channel configuration:

[main]
agent = "main"

[[main.channels]]
name = "HttpChannel"
bind_address = "channel@http"
target_address = "agent@main"
host = "127.0.0.1"
port = 5920

#[[main.channels]]
#name = "TelegramChannel"
#bind_address = "channel@telegram"
#target_address = "agent@main"
#token = "123456:telegram-bot-token"
#poll_timeout = 30
#allowed_chat_ids = [123456789]

This keeps routing explicit:

• channels target agent@main directly
• client cursors are stored server-side by client_id
• aliases can point to durable chat_id values for cross-client resume

Named Actors

Named Actors let one runtime host multiple long-lived, addressable actors. The actor key under [main.actors] is the route name, mailbox identity, and memory scope. The agent field is the reusable agent kind, so multiple actors can instantiate the same agent definition with different runtime identities.

[main.actors.main]
agent = "assistant"
display_name = "Main"

[main.actors.bob]
agent = "architect"
display_name = "Bob"

[main.actors.investment]
agent = "assistant"
display_name = "Investment"

Channels that support mention routing can route a message such as @bob review this design to agent@bob. Channels can also bind directly to a specific actor with target_address = "agent@investment".

Named Actors is a routing feature, not autonomous swarm orchestration. Planning, delegation lifecycle, actor-to-actor relay, and result synthesis belong in a separate orchestration layer.

Runtime

The agent can run in-process or in Docker.

Docker runtime example:

[main.runtime]
kind = "docker"
image = "bos-ai:local"
workspace_dir = "/workspace"

Build and run:

docker build -t bos-ai:local .
boscli gateway start
boscli tui

When Docker is enabled, HttpChannel host binding is normalized for container access, and BOS AI publishes configured HTTP channel ports automatically.

Named agents are capability-deny by default. Omitted tools, skills, memories, and subagents settings are treated as empty allow-lists. Configure each agent with explicit allow-lists, or use "*" to allow all names in that capability group:

[[platform.agents]]
name = "main"
tools = ["ReadFile", "SearchFiles"]
skills = "*"
memories = ["user", "memory"]
subagents = ["researcher"]

exclude_tools, exclude_skills, exclude_memories, and exclude_subagents can still be used to subtract names from an allow-list, including from "*". Scratch agents created directly through harness.create_agent() without a named agent config also start with no tools, skills, memories, or subagents.

Skills

Skills are discovered from configured skill directories. A skill is a directory containing SKILL.md; the directory name is the skill name. Configure workspace skill roots with:

[harness.skills_loader]
skill_dirs = ["skills"]

Agents see allowed skills in the system prompt with each skill's SKILL.md location and summary. LoadSkill reads and returns the full SKILL.md instructions as a tool result; it does not permanently mutate the agent's system prompt.

Subagent Orchestration

BOS already supports a lightweight form of subagent orchestration inside one active harness. The pattern is:

• register multiple named agent profiles under platform.agents
• allow the parent agent to use the local AskSubagent tool
• scope which specialists it may call with subagents = [...]
• customize specialist behavior under [[harness.subagents]]

This is delegated orchestration, not a second long-running actor process. The parent agent stays at agent@main, while specialist agents are invoked on demand as additional agent.ask(...) calls with their own chat IDs.

Minimal use case: a manager agent handles the user-facing chat and delegates focused document analysis to a researcher subagent.

[platform.agent_defaults]
tools = []
subagents = []

[[platform.agents]]
name = "main"
description = "User-facing manager."
tools = ["AskSubagent"]
subagents = ["researcher"]
system_prompt = """
Handle the user-facing workflow. Delegate focused repo analysis when needed.
"""

[[platform.agents]]
name = "researcher"
description = "Focused repo analyst."
tools = []
system_prompt = """
You only perform focused research tasks delegated by the main agent.
Return concise findings.
"""

[[harness.subagents]]
name = "researcher"
task_template = """
You are the {agent_name} specialist.
Use this dedicated thread for delegated analysis work.

Task:
{task}
"""

AskSubagent always runs the specialist in a fresh child thread. The runtime derives that child chat_id from the current parent thread plus a short agent tag and random suffix, for example parent-chat~researcher1a2b3c4d.

Extension Points

The framework is designed to be reconfigured and extended, not forked.

Harness Consolidator

Chat history compaction is handled by a harness-level consolidator service. The agent owns the dynamic history budget (max_tokens) and decides when compaction is needed; the consolidator owns the model and instruction used to summarize.

Configure the default LLM-backed consolidator with:

[harness.consolidator]
model = "gemini/gemini-2.5-flash"
instruction = """
Summarize the conversation history for future turns.
Preserve user intent, decisions, unresolved tasks, tool results, and important constraints.
"""

The consolidator model is resolved from harness.consolidator.model, then BOS_CONSOLIDATOR_MODEL, then BOS_MODEL. It does not fall back to platform.agent_defaults.model.

Core extension points include:

• @ep_provider for model backends
• @ep_tool for tool calls
• @ep_memory_store for long-term memory backends
• @ep_message_store for chat history
• @ep_mail_route for message transport
• @ep_turn_interceptor for turn loop interception
• @ep_channel for external interfaces like HTTP, Telegram, or grouped channels

Minimal example:

from bos.core import ep_tool


@ep_tool(
    name="echo_upper",
    description="Return an uppercase version of the input.",
    parameters={
        "type": "object",
        "properties": {"text": {"type": "string"}},
        "required": ["text"],
    },
)
async def echo_upper(text: str) -> str:
    return text.upper()

Load extensions by adding their modules to platform.extensions in .bos/config.toml.

CLI

The built-in CLI currently exposes:

• boscli init
• boscli auth
• boscli gateway start
• boscli gateway stop
• boscli gateway status
• boscli gateway restart
• boscli tui

Global workspace selection:

boscli -w /path/to/workspace start

What BOS AI Is Good For

• local-first agent runtimes
• custom tool-using assistants
• multi-agent or actor-based orchestration experiments
• private deployments with self-hosted models
• channel-driven agents exposed over HTTP or Telegram

If you want a fixed hosted product, this repo is probably too low-level. If you want infrastructure for shaping your own agent runtime, this is the right layer.