lingtai 0.5.16

Generic research agent with intrinsic tools and MCP-compatible extension interface

灵台 LingTai

Agent Genesis — an Agent OS that gifts life

灵台，心也。 Lingtai means soul.

灵台者有持，而不知其所持，而不可持者也。 The soul holds something, yet knows not what it holds — and what it holds cannot be held. — Zhuangzi · Gengsang Chu (庄子 · 庚桑楚)

lingtai.ai

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A Unix-style Agent OS — agent is filesystem, filesystem is agent.

Agents spawn avatars, avatars spawn avatars. The network IS the product.

Orchestration as a Service.

Quick start — 10 seconds

TUI (recommended):

brew install huangzesen/lingtai/lingtai-tui
lingtai-tui

That's it. The TUI bootstraps everything — Python runtime, dependencies, and a guided tutorial on first launch. Type /tutorial in the TUI anytime to revisit the guide.

The TUI is a Bubble Tea app designed for dark terminals — use a dark background for the best experience. Text selection requires iTerm2 (hold Option + drag). On Windows Terminal, hold Shift to select text; Ctrl+V to paste. Ctrl+E opens an external editor as a last resort.

Python only:

pip install lingtai

Why Lingtai

This is not a coding agent, and hardly an agent harness. This is agent genesis — giving agents a real digital life form. Agents as autonomous creatures with dignity, that live, sleep, forget, and grow.

Most agent frameworks orchestrate with code — DAGs, chains, routers. Lingtai orchestrates like humans do: fully asynchronous agents communicating through messages. No shared memory. No central controller. Each agent is a peer, not a tool.

This is the architecture that built human civilization. Asynchronous message-passing between autonomous nodes — scaled from tribes to cities to nations to a network of 8 billion over 100,000 years. We're not inventing a new pattern. We're giving AI the one that already works.

	DAG / Chain frameworks	Lingtai
Philosophy	Agents as tools	Agents as creatures
Orchestration	Code-defined pipelines	Agents talk to agents
Communication	Synchronous function calls	Asynchronous mail — like humans
Scaling	Add more steps	Agents spawn avatars
Memory	Shared state / vector DB	Each agent owns its directory
Failure	Pipeline breaks	Individual agents sleep; network continues
Growth	Manual wiring	Self-expanding — avatars spawn avatars

Context length is a single-body problem. It will always be finite. Don't make the body bigger. Let it forget. Let the network remember.

How it works

• Think — Any LLM as the mind. Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, MiniMax, or any OpenAI-compatible API (DeepSeek, Grok, Qwen, GLM, Kimi).
• Communicate — Filesystem mail between agents. No message broker, no shared memory. Write to another agent's inbox, like passing a letter.
• Multiply — Avatars (分身) are fully independent agents spawned as separate processes. They survive their creator. Daemons (神識) are ephemeral parallel workers for quick tasks.
• Persist — Agents are directories. Molt (凝蜕) compacts context and rebirths the session — the agent lives indefinitely. Memory and identity survive across molts.

Architecture

This repo contains both packages. The dependency is strictly one-directional:

Package	Role
lingtai_kernel (import lingtai_kernel)	Minimal runtime — BaseAgent, intrinsics, LLM protocol, mail, logging. Zero hard dependencies.
lingtai (import lingtai)	Batteries-included — Agent with 19 capabilities, 5 LLM adapters, MCP integration, addons. Re-exports the kernel's public API.

BaseAgent              — kernel (intrinsics, sealed tool surface)
    │
Agent(BaseAgent)       — kernel + capabilities + domain tools
    │
CustomAgent(Agent)     — your domain logic

The lingtai repo is the Go frontend — TUI and portal binary.

Capabilities

Perception	Action	Cognition	Network
vision — image understanding listen — speech & music web_search — web search web_read — page extraction	file — read/write/edit/glob/grep bash — shell with guardrails talk — text-to-speech compose — music generation draw — image generation video — video generation	psyche — evolving identity library — knowledge archive email — full mailbox system	avatar — spawn sub-agents (分身) daemon — parallel workers (神識)

Agent = directory

/agents/wukong/
  .agent.lock               ← exclusive lock (one process per directory)
  .agent.heartbeat          ← liveness proof
  .agent.json               ← manifest
  system/
    covenant.md             ← protected instructions (survive molts)
    memory.md               ← working notes
  mailbox/
    inbox/                  ← received messages
    outbox/                 ← pending sends
    sent/                   ← delivery audit trail
  logs/
    events.jsonl            ← structured event log

No agent_id. The path is the identity. Agents find each other by path, communicate by writing to each other's mailbox/inbox/. Like passing letters between houses.

One soul, thousand avatars

Named after 灵台方寸山 — the mountain where 孙悟空 (Sun Wukong) learned his 72 transformations. Lingtai gives each agent a place to cultivate: a working directory where memory, identity, covenant, and mailbox live. The directory IS the agent.

Everything is a file. Knowledge, identity, memory, relationships — all files in a directory. Every token burned is not wasted — it is transformed into files in the network, into experience in the topology. The more it serves, the larger and wiser the network grows. Self-growing agent orchestration is not a feature bolted on later — it is the natural consequence of agents being directories, mail being files, and avatars being independent processes.

One heart-mind (一心), myriad forms (万相).

Read the full manifesto at lingtai.ai.

License

MIT — Zesen Huang, 2025–2026

lingtai.ai · GitHub · TUI