clawie 0.1.4

Local CLI control plane for provisioning, orchestrating, and monitoring AI agent fleets

clawie

A local control plane for provisioning, orchestrating, and monitoring a fleet of AI agents from one CLI.

Why clawie

You have multiple agents across providers. Each needs its own config, credentials, channels, and runtime. clawie gives you one place to manage all of it — create agents, delegate tasks between them, isolate their environments, and monitor everything from one CLI.

Core capabilities

Agent orchestration — Delegate tasks across agents in recursive trees with automatic tier-based routing. Fast agents handle lookups, power agents handle analysis, balanced agents handle everything else.

Provider-aware fleet — Production delegated-task delivery is source-pinned for openclaw. picoclaw and zeroclaw lifecycle/auth support remains available for migration and experimentation, with delivery gated until their runtime contracts are pinned. Authorize once, copy private credential material into eligible agent homes, and port sessions between claws with clawie auth port.

Linux isolation — Each agent gets its own Linux user and home directory. Credential files are copied into agent homes with private modes; agents do not read or mutate shared auth/cache files.

Continuous knowledge backup — Agent manifests, prompts, and memory are mirrored into a git repo on every maintenance pass, with secrets redacted and credentials excluded. Restore one agent or the whole fleet with clawie backup restore.

Unified status — One read-only clawie status command shows agent status, runtimes, auth, delegation trees, backup, and health across your entire fleet — with --json for scripting and --watch for a live view.

Requirements

• Linux (Debian/Ubuntu recommended). Uses useradd, systemd, Unix domain sockets, and /tmp — no macOS or Windows support.
• Python 3.10+
• Python dependencies — stdlib on Python 3.11+; Python 3.10 installs tomli for TOML parsing.
• Root/sudo required for runtime isolation (runtime create, credentials sync, provider set, auth apply). Agent creation and clawie status work without root.
• State root under sudo — normal sudo clawie ... uses the invoking user's ~/.clawie via SUDO_USER. For service accounts or custom layouts, set CLAWIE_HOME or pass --config-dir consistently.
• Provider runtimes (optional): Homebrew for zeroclaw/picoclaw, pnpm or npm for openclaw.
• Terminal: UTF-8 with color support for status output.

Install

uv tool install clawie        # from PyPI
uv tool install -e .          # from source

Quick start

clawie config set --provider openclaw --subscription pro
clawie agent create alice --template baseline
clawie status

Agent orchestration

Agents delegate work to each other through a recursive task system with three model tiers:

Tier	Budget	Use for
fast ⚡	4K tokens	Status checks, lookups, validation
balanced ⚖	16K tokens	Most tasks (default)
power ⭐	64K tokens	Architecture, deep analysis, refactoring

# Delegate with a tier
clawie delegation submit --parent planner --child worker --tier fast --payload '{"task":"check"}'

# Spawn session sub-agents on the fly
clawie delegation spawn-session --parent planner --child researcher --tier power
clawie delegation submit --parent planner --child researcher --payload '{"task":"analyze"}'
clawie delegation stop-session --parent planner --child researcher

# See the delegation tree
clawie delegation tree --agent-id planner

Tiers include context budgets that track token usage and trigger compaction warnings to prevent context rot in deep delegation chains.

Key commands

# Agents
clawie agent create alice --model-tier balanced
clawie agent clone alice bob --channel-strategy migrate
clawie agent list
clawie agent show alice

# Delegation
clawie delegation submit --parent p --child c --tier fast --payload '{}'
clawie delegation spawn-session --parent p --child c --tier power
clawie delegation tree --agent-id p
clawie delegation status

# Providers & runtime
clawie config set --provider openclaw
sudo clawie runtime create alice --user alice
clawie runtime detect

# Credentials
clawie auth login picoclaw                        # authorize the manager-side store once
clawie auth import openclaw --from codex          # adopt an existing session
clawie auth port --from openclaw --to picoclaw    # port sessions between claws
sudo clawie auth apply                            # copy private auth files into eligible agents

# Backup (git-backed, continuously maintained)
clawie backup init --remote [e-mail]:you/agent-backup.git
clawie backup run
clawie backup restore --agent alice

# Status
clawie status

# Production acceptance for the configured host
sudo clawie production verify --exercise-watchdog-restart --json

# Release acceptance for the verified delivery surface
sudo clawie production verify --exercise-watchdog-restart --all-provider-contracts --json

Status

clawie status is the read-only front door to the whole fleet:

clawie status                 # full overview
clawie status agents          # one section
clawie status --agent alice   # focus a single agent
clawie status --json          # machine-readable, for scripting
clawie status --watch         # live view; refresh until Ctrl-C

It aggregates setup, health, agents, runtimes, auth, delegation, maintenance, backup, and recent events — and degrades gracefully if any one section can't be read. clawie dashboard is a deprecated alias for clawie status --watch.

Backup

Agent knowledge — core prompts, MEMORY.md, and workspace notes — lives in a git repo that clawie commits to automatically (and pushes, if a remote is configured) on every maintenance pass:

clawie backup init --remote [e-mail]:you/agent-backup.git
sudo clawie maintenance enable        # backup now runs every pass
clawie backup status                  # repo, HEAD, last run
clawie backup restore --agent alice   # bring knowledge back after a loss

Secrets are redacted from the snapshot and credential files are never collected. Missing local agent records are recreated from the backed-up manifest before prompts and workspace knowledge are restored; clawie backup export exists for full-fidelity local snapshots. See docs/backup.md.

Limitations

• Linux only — no macOS or Windows. Relies on Linux users, systemd, and Unix sockets.
• Single machine — all agent communication is over localhost Unix sockets. No network/multi-host delegation.
• User-level isolation, not container-level — agents get separate Linux users and home directories, but share the same kernel, /tmp, and localhost. No Docker/VM boundary.
• Delegation depth capped at 10, max 50 children per agent, 5-minute default timeout.
• SQLite storage — uses an agents-only state table, WAL, and a busy timeout; clawied hosts manifest reconcile cycles, mutating CLI service operations, and a capability-gated control-tool RPC. Linux/root host validation has container proof, and the built wheel has a Colima Linux/systemd production verify --exercise-watchdog-restart proof in docs/proofs/. Repeat that verifier on any different deployment host before accepting that host; picoclaw/zeroclaw delegated-task delivery remains gated until their runtime contracts are source-pinned.
• Token estimation is approximate — uses a chars/4 heuristic, not a real tokenizer.

See docs/requirements.md for full details.

Documentation

Full documentation is in docs/, deployable to GitHub Pages:

• Getting Started
• Requirements & Limitations
• Agent Management
• Delegation & Orchestration
• Providers & Auth
• Runtime Isolation
• Backup & Restore
• Status
• CLI Reference
• Python API

Development

uv run clawie --help
uv run --with pytest pytest -q

License

Apache-2.0