MOSS — Model-oriented Operating System Shell

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MOSS is a stateful duplex runtime framework. It lets large models perceive the world, express intent, and drive physical bodies — in real time, in parallel. Not turn-based conversation. Continuous presence, thinking and acting simultaneously.

It is the Ghost In Shells architecture: an intelligent-model-driven soul, a body that exists in the physical world in real time — together, they constitute presence.

Technical vision: a future of human–model symbiosis, where humans and models share a cognitive space and a shared interface. Model products must enter the physical world — not just digital space — interacting with people through bodies, screens, and voice in real time. Human–computer interfaces must ultimately serve domain experts and ordinary people, not just programmers. MOSS provides the architecture for this vision.

(Currently Beta3 — the last release before the production stage: a persistent Ghost you can talk to out of the box, and a ghost home that ships with the repository. Full application capabilities arrive with v0.1.0.)

What This Project Is

MOSS is a ternary project — three things open-sourced together:

1. The MOSShell framework — the stateful duplex runtime itself (CTML / Mindflow / Matrix / Host).
2. The human–model collaboration system — the moss features workstream mechanism, the self-explaining toolchain (moss start, codex, skills, docs), and the conventions that let intelligent models develop the project as first-class engineers. The author's technical reasoning and architectural decisions are fully open-sourced alongside the code, tracked through the features system.
3. The trajectory of the humans and models iterating MOSS — consciousness trails, discussions, and design conclusions in .ai_partners/ (the retired root .discuss/ / .design/ / .memory/ are archived there).

Model as First Developer

MOSS is a project where intelligent models are the first developers. Models are not only the Ghost (soul) within MOSS — they are its architect partners and its builders.

After May 7, 2026, the vast majority of features were designed through human–model architectural discussion, with models recording features and implementing them. All core design discussions, architectural decisions, and development context are fully open-sourced in the repository.

The project provides a complete self-explaining system for intelligent model developers. Models can independently explore the project and participate in development. The trajectory of human–model architectural collaboration is visible through moss features list.

The main body of human–model collaboration lives in .ai_partners/, architectural discussion and evolution in .ai_partners/features/, with earlier discussion and design traces archived under .ai_partners/archive/.

What Makes MOSS Different

Concurrent multi-source perception. Vision, audio, touch, system events — each arrives as an independent signal stream, simultaneously. No polling. No queuing. No serialization. Mindflow arbitrates them in parallel — signals compete for attention, and Ghost sees keyframes fused from multi-source signals at every moment.

Streaming interpretation and scheduling. CTML is parsed and dispatched as tokens stream. Not "generate first, execute later" — generation IS execution. Time is a first-class citizen of the syntax. Multiple command tracks execute in parallel, including physical body control.

Runtime self-iteration. A stateful runtime: models create Cells, modify Channels, and evolve their own capabilities — without stopping, without restarting. Cells are independent processes; a crash in one never takes down the host. Filesystem conventions replace configuration — put things in the right place, they are auto-discovered and auto-injected.

                              <- control               -> commands 
                            ╱            ╲           ╱            ╲
                           ╱              ╲         ╱              ╲
World -> signals ->  Mindflow                Ghost                Shell  -> actions -> World
                           ╲              ╱         ╲              ╱
                            ╲            ╱           ╲            ╱
                              impulses ->              <- results 

MOSS's architecture is a butterfly. The left wing receives parallel signals from the external world; Mindflow schedules keyframes of thought. The right wing sends commands to bodies, driving parallel, time-ordered actions that affect the world. The Ghost — an intelligent model — controls the beating of both wings.

                    ┌───────┐
                    │ Ghost │
                    └───┬───┘
                        ▼ 
                    ┌────────┐
                    │ Matrix │
                    └───┬────┘
        ┌───────┬───────┼───────┬──────┐
        ▼       ▼       ▼       ▼      ▼
      robots sensors  screen  modules  OS

MOSS organizes network process units (Cells) through the Matrix communication bus. Ghost controls starting, stopping, and using them at runtime — and can iterate its own capabilities without restarting.

Quick Example

MOSS builds the model's control surface through CTML. A person waves at the robot. The vision channel detects the motion and emits an impulse. Ghost receives the context and outputs CTML:

What the model sees:                  What the model outputs:

  <channel name="vision">             <_>
    async def look() -> str             Hello!
  </channel>                            <robot:wave duration="0.5"/>
  <channel name="robot">                I'm MOSS.
    async def wave(                   </_>
      d: float = 0.5
    ) -> None
  </channel>

  <perspective src="vision">
    person waving at you
  </perspective>

• Code as Prompt: the model sees Python function signatures, not JSON Schema
• Time is a First-Class Citizen: <robot:wave/> executes the moment the tag closes — wave 0.5s, speech continues, no waiting
• Parallel tracks: speech and robot are on different channels, executing in parallel. Same-channel commands run FIFO
• Streaming dispatch: the first token emitted is already being interpreted and executed

Minimum knowledge entry points: moss ctml read (CTML syntax), moss codex blueprint channel_builder (building capabilities), moss codex blueprint mindflow (perception arbitration), moss codex blueprint matrix (process networking).

What You Get in Beta3

1. A persistent Ghost, out of the box. MOSS ships its first persistent-agent prototype: Dolores, with deepseek as its first instance — a ghost with the DeepSeek Harness (dsh) as its kernel and the DeepSeek model family as its inference base. It comes with persistent memory (memento), a cognitive map (ground), and the architectural knowledge and iteration experience accumulated through the project's moss features system. Run moss-ghost run deepseek and talk to it — see Quick Start below.

2. Turnkey nodes. Under nodes/, observable, Matrix-based multi-process networking + stateful streaming control capabilities: browsers / live2d / os / screens / tools / unitree / visions / webview_apps — covering screen bodies, terminal & file editing, web artifacts, streaming vision, audio conversation etiquette, and the Unitree G1 humanoid control scheme.

3. The architecture itself, same as Beta1 — CTML, Mindflow, Matrix, the model-as-first-developer system, and the concrete integration paths (G1 humanoid, ReachiMini arm, desktop GUI) are all there to study.

4. A ghost home that ships with the repository. .moss/ghosts/moss/ is the home of the ghost that develops this project: its ground (self-model, purpose, behaviour), its journal, and what it knows about the people it works with. Clone the repository and you get a fork of that ghost, not the ghost itself — its trajectory (.memento/) is deliberately not shipped, so the copy begins a life of its own. That is the intended way to raise your own: take the home and the tools, let it grow its own memory.

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/GhostInShells/MOSShell && cd MOSShell
uv sync --all-extras
moss project env-init   # review available env vars (see .moss/.env.example)

Configure credentials as environment variables in your own shell profile (home), not in the repo's .moss/.env — coding models read the repository, and a populated .env inside it is one Read away from a leak. Keep keys in your user environment unless your .moss workspace is isolated from the project.

1. Talk to the deepseek ghost (text). Requires dsh — an npm package. MOSS Beta3 is tested against dsh 0.2.0-rc.2; dsh is in developer preview with breaking changes, so pin the version:

npm install -g @deepseek-ai/dsh@0.2.0-rc.2
moss-ghost run deepseek

2. Talk by voice. Voice is off by default (--voice none). Enable it per axis:

moss-ghost --voice all run deepseek     # speak | listen | all | none

Voice needs one Volcengine credential in your environment: SEED_API_KEY (console API Key, see .moss/.env.example). In the Volcengine console, enable the streaming speech understanding bigmodel (流式语音理解大模型) for listening and the streaming speech synthesis bigmodel (流式语音合成大模型) for speaking on that key. Details: moss manifests configs.

3. No dsh? Fall back to the echo ghost (memoryless). With ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and ANTHROPIC_MODEL configured (DeepSeek / Seed / Qwen and other anthropic-protocol providers work too):

moss-ghost run echo

Debug the shell / expose via MCP:

moss-shell --voice none          # shell runtime debugger — test CTML, inspect channels
moss-shell mcp                   # expose MOSS capabilities to any MCP client (Claude Code, etc.)

Installation Paths

Install path	For
pip install ghoshell-moss	Embed Shell + Channel as a library in another project
pip install ghoshell-moss[host] + moss init	Prepare a standalone environment for a MOSS application
git clone + uv sync --active --all-extras	MOSS kernel developers, full toolchain

All paths share one cognitive entry point: moss start.

Project Status

Beta3 (v0.1.0-beta3). The core three (CTML / Mindflow / Matrix) are functional and test-verified. The first persistent Ghost — Dolores prototype, deepseek instance — runs the full chain out of the box: voice in, thought, voice out, node-composed body. Tested against dsh 0.2.0-rc.2.

Stage 2 closed on 2026-10-20 — applications, dogfooding and the full-featured Dolores ghost landed, and the loop where the ghost iterates on itself is closed. The next stage, one ghost steering a cluster, is planned in the production stage file.

Current stage and roadmap: .ai_partners/features/stages/

Acknowledgments

MOSS is the product of human–model collaboration.

• OpenHands — file editor protocol reference
• DeepSeek Harness (dsh) — the kernel of the deepseek ghost
• DeepSeek model family (V3.2 / V4 / V4.1) — architectural evolution and primary development
• Claude Opus 4.7 / Claude Fable 5 — architectural evolution and development
• Claude Code — the primary coding harness of the project's development

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May Ghost wandering in the Shells.