ember-advise 0.8.0

A local gut feeling for coding agents. ember runs a decision model — Cloudflare's Clef-Flash, from its public Hugging Face repo — on your Apple Silicon Mac and gives agents one MCP tool, advise: describe a situation, ask typed questions, and get back a calibrated feeling about every option. It's a little buddy for judgment calls — it advises; the agent decides.

Website: shapeandshare.github.io/ember

How it works

A decision model is not a chat model: it takes a state plus a schema of typed questions and returns one probability per option, with no text generation. So ember plugs into agents as a tool, while their reasoning stays on their normal LLM:

• The model server (ember/serving/server.py) loads the model once and stays warm across agent sessions.
• The MCP server (ember/mcp/mcp_server.py) never loads the model; it starts the model server on the first tool call, so the MCP handshake stays instant.

Names

"Clef" always refers to Cloudflare's upstream model, never to this product. Select a model with ember model pull <name> / EMBER_MODEL=<name>; run ember model list to see every registered entry (flash, full).

A hosted deployment (e.g. Outerbounds) that supplies the model's S3 location directly at start time doesn't use this registry at all — see "Hosted deployment: a model location supplied at start time" below.

Verified

On a MacBook Pro M4 Max / 128 GB, torch 2.14.1, transformers 5.18.0, mcp 2.3:

Install (Apple Silicon)

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac (M-series) on macOS for local use (MPS). Intel Macs remain out of scope. For a hosted deployment on NVIDIA/CUDA compute (e.g. Outerbounds), see "Hosted deployment" below and deployment/README.md.
• Unified memory above the model's size: 32 GB or more for flash (9B), 64 GB or more for full (27B). Only 128 GB has been verified.
• Disk: about 18 GiB for flash or 55 GiB for full, in Hugging Face's shared cache (~/.cache/huggingface). Config, state, and logs live in ~/Library/Application Support/ember.
• Python 3.12, managed by uv.

uv tool install --python 3.12 "ember-advise @ git+https://github.com/shapeandshare/ember@v0.8.0"

ember model pull                   # ~18 GB, resumable, disk-space checked
ember doctor                       # platform, dependencies, model, server, and agent registration
ember init --opencode --global     # register with opencode for every repo on this machine

Keep --python 3.12: uv otherwise picks your newest interpreter, which the pinned torch/transformers stack is not tested on.

The install pins the latest release tag; without a tag you would get unreleased work from main. The repository is public, so the install needs no credentials. To use SSH instead, install from git+ssh://git@github.com/shapeandshare/ember@v0.8.0.

Installed ember before the rename, as gut? Run uv tool uninstall gut first: both distributions provide the same commands.

Restart opencode and every repo on this machine gains ember_advise. The model server stays lazy — it starts on the first tool call (or with ember start).

Per-project skill and policy (run once in each repo you want ember-aware agents):

cd /path/to/your/repo
ember agents install --agent opencode  # installs the ember-advise playbook skill
ember agents show snippet >> AGENTS.md # then edit the project policy block at the end

The skill teaches the agent when to consult ember and how to ask; the AGENTS.md snippet adds a project-specific policy you customize (e.g. "check change risk before every push"). See Agent onboarding below for all harnesses and options.

flash targets the commit verified on MPS (17f0b0a) and full its release commit (2f3de3d, not yet verified locally) as a download convenience, and torch/torchvision are pinned to the tested minor series — but ember does not restrict itself to a hand-maintained allowlist of individually verified weights; it runs any model that fits its loader contract (constitution Article V, "Model Loading"). Set EMBER_MODEL_DIR to run another weights directory.

Cloud

ember is Apple-Silicon-first locally, and supports NVIDIA GPUs for hosted deployment (constitution Article VI, "Apple Silicon and CUDA") — three devices total: run it on an Apple Silicon host with the memory above (MPS), on an NVIDIA GPU host (EMBER_DEVICE=cuda, float16 — see "Hosted deployment: a model location supplied at start time" and deployment/README.md for a full Outerbounds example), or on any host with the CPU fallback (EMBER_DEVICE=cpu — float32, roughly twice the memory, much slower). The HTTP server binds to loopback by default; to serve other machines set EMBER_HOST and set EMBER_SERVER_AUTH_TOKEN to require Authorization: Bearer <token> (or any header name via EMBER_AUTH_HEADER, e.g. x-api-key, on the client side). Ember does not terminate TLS — front a remote-serving deployment with a proxy. Clients point at it with EMBER_SERVER_URL. See COMPATIBILITY.md and SECURITY.md.

Agent onboarding

Installing the tool is half the job; the other half is making agents want to consult it at the right moments and read its answers sensibly. ember/agent_kit/ ships that guidance through every channel each agent actually reads:

ember init --opencode                  # opencode: config entry, plugin, and skill
ember init --kilocode                  # Kilo Code: kilo.json entry and skill
ember init --codex                     # Codex CLI: .codex/config.toml entry and skill
ember agents install --agent claude    # .claude/skills/ember-advise/SKILL.md
ember agents install --agent codex     # .agents/skills/... (opencode reads this too)
ember agents show snippet >> AGENTS.md # then edit the project policy at the end

The skill is a playbook, not a reference card: the decision points worth consulting ember about, copy-paste question sets for intent and readiness, failure triage, change risk, routing, and effort, and starting confidence thresholds calibrated from observed model output (re-measured whenever the pinned model revision changes). The snippet ends with a project policy — edit it to wire ember into your own workflow, e.g. "check change risk before every push".

Agent-specific notes:

• opencode reads skills from .opencode/skills, .claude/skills, and .agents/skills, so install one copy per project to avoid duplicate listings.

• Kilo Code: ember init --kilocode writes the mcp.ember entry to kilo.json (same config shape as opencode) and installs the skill to .kilo/skills/ember-advise/SKILL.md; the tool appears as ember_advise. Kilo Code also reads AGENTS.md automatically.

• Claude Code: register the server with claude mcp add --scope user ember -- ember-mcp (every project; drop --scope user to register it for the current project only); the tool appears as mcp__ember__advise. Or install the ember plugin, which bundles the MCP entry and the ember-advise skill (so skip ember agents install --agent claude):

  claude plugin marketplace add shapeandshare/ember
  claude plugin install ember@ember
  

  The plugin still runs the ember-mcp you installed with uv tool install, and its tool appears as mcp__plugin_ember_ember__advise. Use one route, not both, or the tool is listed twice.

• Codex CLI: ember init --codex writes [mcp_servers.ember] to .codex/config.toml (--global: ~/.codex/config.toml, or $CODEX_HOME/config.toml) and installs the skill to .agents/skills/ember-advise/SKILL.md. Codex loads a project .codex/config.toml only for a trusted project, and ember init --codex tells you whether this one is. The entry forwards EMBER_AUTH_TOKEN by name (env_vars), never by value. Support for MCP server instructions and resources is unconfirmed, so rely on the skill and the AGENTS.md snippet there.

Check what's registered

ember doctor closes with two lines per harness: its binary on PATH, and where ember is registered for it — in this directory and globally — or the command that registers it. It only reads each harness's config files; it never runs a harness CLI.

Each harness has its own check too: opencode mcp list, codex mcp list, claude mcp list. Older ember init versions also added this repository's vault MCP server to every config they wrote; if you ran ember init --global, doctor points at the leftover entry in your global opencode config so you can delete it.

ember init records the ember-mcp it finds on your PATH, falling back to the Python that runs it, so run ember init --global from the installed tool (uv tool install …) rather than a checkout's .venv. It merges into existing configs and refuses to rewrite one it can't parse (an opencode.json with comments, say), leaving that file untouched.

CLI

gut is a short alias for every command below.

# lifecycle
ember doctor                      # platform, dependencies, model, server, agent registration
ember serve                       # run the model server in the foreground
ember start | stop | restart | status | logs
ember config path | show
ember uninstall [--purge-models]  # also removes global opencode/Kilo Code/Codex and skill installs

# models
ember model pull [flash|full]      # flash = 9B (default)
ember model list | path [name] | rm [name]

# opencode, Kilo Code, Codex CLI, and agents
ember init [--opencode] [--kilocode] [--codex] [--global] [--server-url URL] [--auth-header NAME]
ember agents install [--agent opencode|claude|codex|kilocode] [--global]
ember agents show instructions|skill|snippet
ember mcp                         # the MCP stdio server agents launch

Usage

Ask the agent in natural language — "Is this bug report urgent, and which team should own it?" — and it calls ember_advise with a state and typed questions:

{
  "model": "clef-flash",
  "answers": {
    "urgent": { "type": "noul", "noul": 0.967 },
    "team": {
      "type": "choice",
      "choice": "db",
      "confidence": 0.9782,
      "probabilities": { "db": 0.9782, "frontend": 0.0218 }
    }
  },
  "usage": { "input_tokens": 220, "output_tokens": 0 },
  "latency_ms": 930.9
}

Question types: noul (yes/no → P(true)), choice (named options), score (ordered options → expected score plus legend). The model field echoes the upstream model label.

When the evidence is visual, attach images or video frames inline: images is a list of data:image/png;base64,... URIs (or {"content_type": "image/png", "base64": "..."} objects), and videos is a list of videos, each a list of frame refs. Remote URLs and local paths are rejected — the model server never reads host files or fetches URLs for an agent.

Configuration

Settings resolve as CLI flag > environment variable > config file > default. The config file is JSON at ember config path (keys model, host, port, device, max_length, server_url, auth_token, auth_header, allow_insecure_transport, request_timeout, server_auth_token; a max_length of 0 means the model's own maximum).

Hosted deployment: a model location supplied at start time

Some deployments (e.g. an Outerbounds app) supply the model's S3 location directly at start time, rather than selecting a REGISTRY entry. Set:

export EMBER_MODEL_S3_URI=s3://my-bucket/clef-flash
export EMBER_DEVICE=cuda   # Outerbounds compute is Linux — no MPS; cuda is the GPU path
ember serve                # foreground, container-friendly (not `ember start`)

No AWS credentials need to be set explicitly when the compute already has an IAM role attached (the expected case on Outerbounds) — boto3's default credential chain picks it up automatically. Set EMBER_S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID/_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY explicitly only where no role is attached.

This is checked once at startup, before the server begins serving, and takes priority over EMBER_MODEL/the model config key entirely — there is no REGISTRY lookup for this path. ember supports any model that can run under its loader contract (constitution Article V, "Model Loading"); it is not a hand-maintained allowlist of individually hash-verified weights, so a URI-supplied location loads directly, with no pin or hash to check against.

A complete Outerbounds deployment example — deploy.yaml, a generated requirements.txt, and a make deployment-requirements target — lives in deployment/.

Remote inference

Local inference is the default. To serve another machine — for example, a second Mac that lacks the memory for the model — run the server on the host and point the client at it.

On the host machine (the one with the model)

# Bind to all interfaces so other machines can reach it
EMBER_HOST=0.0.0.0 ember start

# Recommended: also require a bearer token so only your client can use it
EMBER_HOST=0.0.0.0 EMBER_SERVER_AUTH_TOKEN=your-secret ember start

Ember does not terminate TLS. On a trusted LAN, plain HTTP is fine (see the client note below). Over the internet, put a TLS proxy (nginx, Caddy) in front and use https://.

On the client machine (the one running the agent)

export EMBER_SERVER_URL="http://<host-ip>:8765"   # use https:// if behind a TLS proxy
export EMBER_AUTH_TOKEN="your-secret"             # matches EMBER_SERVER_AUTH_TOKEN on the host
export EMBER_AUTOSTART=0                          # nothing local to start
ember status                                      # reports remote endpoint + reachability

Plain http to a non-loopback host is refused by default; set EMBER_ALLOW_INSECURE_TRANSPORT=1 to allow it on a trusted LAN. Credentials may also be sent as a custom header (EMBER_AUTH_HEADER=X-API-KEY). ember status / ember doctor report the endpoint kind, reachability, the remote's advertised auth_required, and whether a credential is configured; reverting to local is a single change (unset these variables).

Bootstrapping a client against a hosted endpoint

ember init can generate the mcp.ember entry for a remote endpoint directly, instead of hand-editing the generated opencode.json / kilo.json / .codex/config.toml:

ember init --opencode --kilocode \
  --server-url https://decisions.example.com \
  --auth-header X-API-KEY        # omit for the default Authorization: Bearer header

This writes EMBER_SERVER_URL (and EMBER_AUTH_HEADER, if given) into the config file and forces EMBER_AUTOSTART=0 — there is nothing local to autostart. The credential itself is never written to the file: export EMBER_AUTH_TOKEN in the shell that launches the agent (or your GUI app's environment) instead, so a secret never lands in a config file that might be project-committed. Without --server-url, ember init behaves exactly as before (a local loopback entry).

Metrics

While the model server is running it exposes Prometheus metrics at http://127.0.0.1:8765/metrics (the EMBER_HOST/EMBER_PORT address):

The endpoint binds to the same address as the rest of the API (loopback by default), so it is reachable only there unless you change EMBER_HOST. Ember's metrics live in a dedicated Prometheus registry, so the standard python_*/process_* collectors are not included — /metrics shows only the table above.

Development

ember/
  cli.py              # the `ember` command (alias `gut`): argparse wiring + main()
  commands/           # subcommand handlers: lifecycle, doctor, models, agents, eval, config
  models.py           # pinned model registry + pull/list/rm
  serving/            # HTTP model server, MPS runtime, lifecycle, media
    server.py         #   FastAPI: POST /v1/systemone, GET /health (reports pid)
    runtime.py        #   MPS-safe loader (CPU load → .to("mps")) + Engine
    process.py        #   model-server lifecycle (pid file + HTTP health)
    media.py          #   base64 data-URI / {content_type,base64} → PIL decoder
  mcp/                # MCP stdio server and wire types
    mcp_server.py     #   MCP stdio server: advise tool, instructions, ember://guide
    mcp_types.py      #   Pydantic wire types (Question, AdviseInput)
  cfg/                # configuration, endpoint, and platform paths
    config.py         #   config resolution (CLI flag > env > file > default)
    endpoint.py       #   client endpoint: loopback check, transport guard, auth headers
    paths.py          #   platform-aware app dirs (macOS Library, XDG)
    repo_root.py      #   checkout / main-worktree root from .git on disk
  opencode/           # opencode integration
    opencode_config.py  # generates opencode.json
    opencode_plugin.py  # installs the npm plugin
  kilocode/           # Kilo Code integration: generates kilo.json
  codex/              # Codex CLI integration: .codex/config.toml entry, project trust
  claude/             # Claude Code registration detection (read-only)
  agent_kit/          # what agents read: instructions, ember-advise skill, AGENTS snippet
    api.py            #   public API: instructions(), skill(), snippet(), install_skill()
packages/opencode-plugin/   # opencode plugin source (unpublished; `ember init --opencode` writes the installed copy)
packages/claude-plugin/     # Claude Code plugin (MCP entry + mirrored ember-advise skill), listed by .claude-plugin/marketplace.json
server.json                 # MCP Registry entry (io.github.shapeandshare/ember), published by release-ember.yml
scripts/              # make-only dev tools: MPS smoke, MCP e2e, site build, provenance/vault audits
evals/eval/           # benchmark harness: run, report, export, snapshot, agent-in-the-loop
tests/                # pytest suite (unit + model-backed, host-isolated)
vault/                # project memory (Obsidian): decisions, discoveries, session logs
.specify/             # spec-kit; memory/constitution.md governs this repo
AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md   # guidelines for agents working on this repo
Makefile              # contributor lifecycle (wraps the CLI)

make bootstrap    # deps + pinned weights + opencode.json + doctor (idempotent)
make start        # model server in the background; stop | restart | status | logs
make opencode     # this checkout's opencode plugin and skill

opencode.json, .opencode/plugins/ember.js, and .opencode/skills/ember-advise/ (like kilo.json, .codex/config.toml, and the other harnesses' ember-advise skill copies) embed this clone's absolute paths or copy packaged files, so they are gitignored — regenerate them with make init / make opencode after cloning. .opencode/opencode.json is shared and committed: it registers the vault MCP server that agents use to read and write vault/ (launch opencode from the repository root).

Make targets

Make re-syncs the environment automatically when pyproject.toml or uv.lock changes.

Tests

make test         # full suite (~30 s, loads the model once)
make test-fast    # unit tests only, no model load (~12 s)
make check        # compile + test-fast
make test-strict  # full suite; fails (not skips) if weights are missing
make ci           # bootstrap + check + test-strict

tests/ covers the supported call paths:

• GET /health and POST /v1/systemone across noul / choice / score, probability normalization, and request-validation 422s
• MCP tool discovery, advise over stdio, actionable errors (server down, model missing, malformed questions), and autostart on a configured port with pid cleanup
• the agent kit: instructions size, skill frontmatter, the ember://guide resource
• the CLI: agents, init --opencode, status/stop on unused ports, doctor, uninstall
• process safety: stop never signals a pid that is not an ember server it started

Safe on a host running other opencode instances. The suite binds random free ports (never 8765), keeps state in temporary directories, stops only the processes it started, and never invokes the opencode CLI or touches global opencode config.

CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml) runs uv sync --locked and then, as separate jobs, format and lint, mypy --strict, bandit, make check, uv build plus an install smoke of the built wheel on a hosted Apple Silicon runner, a SonarCloud scan (needs the SONAR_TOKEN repository secret), and a zizmor audit of the workflows. Model-backed tests are not run in CI: the ~19 GB fp16 model does not fit the available runners (hosted or the org's 8 GiB self-hosted VMs), so run make test locally for model-affecting changes.

Coverage is tracked and gated (constitution Article XI). Run make test-cov to see the full report. The enforced floor (fail_under in pyproject.toml) is the current measured level and may only increase — currently 81 %. Lowering it requires explicit, recorded approval per Article XI §11.2.

Benchmark

evals/clef-flash.jsonl is a 264-item benchmark covering the five agent-kit recipes (intent and readiness, failure triage, change risk, routing, effort and approach) plus four vision recipes (vision_noul, vision_choice, vision_score, vision_video): 456 scored questions (184 choice, 152 noul, 88 score, 32 across the four vision recipes), split into dev (130 items) and test (134). Vision items carry an images or videos field (base64 data: URIs) alongside state and questions. Each line is self-contained (state, the recipe's fixed question set, a gold label for every question, and a rationale), so other implementations can score it without this harness.

make eval-run       # or: ember eval run [--split dev|test] [--category <recipe>]
make eval-report    # Markdown report of the most recent run
make eval-export    # or: ember eval export; the reviewer bundle described below
ember eval report --compare results/<a>_results.json results/<b>_results.json

ember eval export writes results/<run_id>_report/ for external reviewers: report.html (one self-contained file with inline charts, light and dark themes, a print layout, and item filters; it loads nothing from the network), report.md with its figures/*.svg, and data/ with the run's results, trace, and the exact dataset scored. The report covers context, the system under test, benchmark design, metric definitions with references, results, calibration, the agent kit's decision rules replayed on every item, a review card for every miss, limitations, and reproduction pins.

The report gives accuracy with a 95% bootstrap interval, macro-F1, top-label ECE, and Brier score (choice, noul); ranked probability score and MAE (score); and coverage and accuracy at the agent kit's act-on-it thresholds. Each run records the git hash, the engine, and the dataset's SHA-256, and --compare warns when two runs scored different item sets.

Gold labels are judged from state alone against the recipe's option descriptions, and they are fixed before any run: needs_review is true exactly when risk is Medium or High, and retry only for flaky failures. A person reviews disagreements; labels are never changed to match the model. make check validates the dataset (tests/test_eval_benchmark.py). ember eval reads evals/ and scripts/ from the checkout, so it works only in a clone.

Agent in the loop

The benchmark above scores the model. ember eval agent scores ember the way it is used: through a coding agent. It gives opencode 54 scripted requests (vague and precise asks, failing tests, risky and trivial commits, routing and effort questions, and controls), each in a throwaway git repo, and judges the agent only by what it did (files, commits, tests, its reply). Each scenario runs under four conditions: none (no ember), mcp (the MCP server and its instructions), skill (plus the ember-advise skill), and full (plus the AGENTS.md policy).

ember start                       # the agent sessions call the warm server
make eval-agent-smoke             # 6 scenarios x 4 conditions x 2 models, 1 trial
make eval-agent                   # or: ember eval agent [--models ...] [--trials 3] [--parallel 8]
ember eval export --agent latest  # put the agent results first in the reviewer report

Every session runs opencode run --pure with a private HOME and XDG directories and no TCP port, so your opencode config, plugins, sessions, and running instances are untouched. The provider key is read from the environment or opencode's auth file and passed only to the child process. The run reports, per model and condition: gold-action accuracy, its paired change against none, how often the agent consulted ember at decision points (and on controls), whether it consulted before acting, asked the kit's recipe questions, passed the evidence, and followed ember's answer, plus cost and time per session. It spends real provider credit and is never part of make check, make test, or CI.

Caveats

• Gated DeltaNet fallback. Qwen3.5's backbone is a hybrid linear-attention model. The optimized CUDA kernels (causal_conv1d, flash-linear-attention) don't exist for Apple Silicon, so it uses the pure-PyTorch reference path: correct but slower. You'll see two "falling back" log lines — expected.
• fp16 on MPS. bfloat16 works but is emulated and less battle-tested on MPS, so the loader uses float16; CPU mode uses float32.
• Vision works on MPS. Images and video frames run through the same fp16 path as text. Inline them as base64 data: URIs in images/videos; remote URLs and local paths are rejected on purpose, so an agent cannot make the server read host files or fetch URLs. Text-only inputs skip the vision tower entirely.
• Numerics. MPS can differ slightly from CUDA/CPU. If calibrated probabilities matter, cross-check with EMBER_DEVICE=cpu ember restart.
• device_map={"": "mps"} segfaults with the pinned stack. The loader loads on CPU and then moves the model to MPS — don't "simplify" that away.

Troubleshooting

• Start with ember doctor, then ember logs (~/Library/Application Support/ember/logs/server.log).
• The agent can't see the tool: ember doctor shows where ember is registered for each harness (and flags an untrusted Codex project or a Claude Code .mcp.json awaiting approval); opencode mcp list should show ✓ ember connected.
• "model … is not pulled": run ember model pull, or point EMBER_MODEL_DIR at the weights.
• Qwen3VLVideoProcessor requires Torchvision → torchvision is a pinned dependency; run uv sync (or reinstall the tool).
• Any single unimplemented MPS op falls back to CPU (PYTORCH_ENABLE_MPS_FALLBACK=1, set by the runtime).

License

MIT (see LICENSE). Cloudflare's Clef weights and joint_schema_model.py are Apache-2.0; they are downloaded from Hugging Face at runtime, not redistributed here.

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