open-strix 0.1.37

Minimal autonomous agent harness with LangGraph Deep Agents

open-strix

A persistent AI companion that lives in Discord or a built-in local web chat, remembers everything, and gets better over time.

uvx open-strix setup --home my-agent --github
cd my-agent
uv run open-strix

Three commands. You have an agent. Open http://localhost:8084 and start talking.

No Discord? No problem. The built-in web UI works out of the box — just set web_ui_port: 8084 in config.yaml. Discord is optional. See Local Web UI.

What is this?

open-strix is an opinionated framework for building long-running AI agents. Not chatbots — companions. Agents that develop personality through conversation, maintain memory across sessions, schedule their own work, and learn from their mistakes.

It runs on cheap models (MiniMax M2.5, ~$0.01/message), talks to you over Discord or a small built-in web UI, and stores everything in git. No vector databases, no cloud services, no enterprise pricing. Just files, memory blocks, and a git history you can actually read.

How you interact with it: You talk to it on Discord or in the local web UI. It talks back using tools (send_message, react). It has scheduled jobs that fire even when you're not around. Over time, it develops interests, tracks your projects, and starts doing useful things without being asked.

Why this exists

Most agent frameworks optimize for tool-calling pipelines or enterprise orchestration. open-strix optimizes for a different thing: a single agent that knows you and gets better over time.

Three design bets:

• Focused. Small core, everything else is skills — markdown files the agent reads and follows. Add capabilities by dropping a file in skills/, or let the agent discover and install them from ClawHub at runtime. MCP servers and an HTTP API handle external integrations.
• Cheap. Defaults to MiniMax M2.5 via the Anthropic-compatible API. Pennies per message. This is a personal tool, not an enterprise deployment. Run it on a $5/month VPS.
• Stable. This is the weird one. open-strix ships with built-in skills for self-diagnosis — prediction calibration loops, event introspection, onboarding that fades into regular operation. The agent can read its own logs, check whether its predictions were right, and notice when it's drifting. The design draws on cybernetics (specifically viable system theory): an agent that can't monitor and correct its own behavior will eventually degrade. So the correction loops are built in, not bolted on.

In other words, it's built to be sustainable.

How it works

The home repo

When you run uvx open-strix setup, it creates a directory — the agent's home. Everything the agent knows lives here:

blocks/          # YAML memory blocks — identity, goals, patterns. In every prompt.
state/           # Markdown files — projects, notes, research. Read on demand.
skills/          # Markdown skill files. Drop one in, agent picks it up.
logs/
  events.jsonl   # Every tool call, error, and event. The agent can read this.
  chat-history.jsonl # Append-only chat transcript across Discord, web UI, and stdin.
  journal.jsonl  # Agent's own log — what happened, what it predicted.
scheduler.yaml   # Cron jobs the agent manages itself.
config.yaml      # Model, Discord config, prompt tuning.

Everything except logs is committed to git after every turn. The git history is the audit trail. You can git log to see exactly what your agent did and when.

Memory

Two layers:

• Blocks (blocks/*.yaml) — short text that appears in every prompt. Identity, communication style, current focus, relationships. The agent reads and writes these via tools.
• Files (state/) — longer content the agent reads when relevant. Research notes, project tracking, world context. Blocks point to files when depth is needed.

No embeddings, no vector search. Just files and git. The agent's memory is whatever you can cat.

Skills

A skill is a markdown file in skills/ with a YAML header. That's it. No SDK, no registration, no build step. The agent sees all skills in its prompt and invokes them by name.

---
name: my-skill
description: What this skill does and when to use it.
---
# Instructions for the agent
...

open-strix ships with built-in skills that teach the agent how to operate:

Skill	Purpose
onboarding	Walks the agent through establishing identity, goals, and schedules
memory	How to maintain and organize memory blocks and state files
skill-creator	Create new skills from repeated workflows
skill-acquisition	Discover and install skills from ClawHub, skillflag-compliant CLIs, and GitHub
prediction-review	Calibration loops — revisit past predictions against ground truth
introspection	Self-diagnosis from event logs and behavioral patterns

The agent can also discover and install skills from the ecosystem at runtime. The built-in skill-acquisition skill teaches it how to search ClawHub (a public registry with 64K+ archived skills), install from skillflag-compliant CLI tools, and wrap external skills for its own use. See docs/skills.md for the full extensibility model.

Don't want some builtins? Disable them in config.yaml:

disable_builtin_skills:
  - skill-acquisition
  - prediction-review

Scheduling

The agent has tools to create, modify, and remove its own scheduled jobs. Jobs are cron expressions stored in scheduler.yaml. When a job fires, it sends a prompt to the agent — even if no human is around.

This is how agents develop autonomy: scheduled check-ins, maintenance routines, periodic scanning. The agent decides what to schedule based on what it learns about you.

Events API

Every tool call, incoming message, error, and scheduler trigger is logged to logs/events.jsonl. The agent can read its own event log — and the introspection skill teaches it how. This is the self-diagnosis backbone: the agent has full visibility into what it did and what went wrong.

When api_port is set in config.yaml, a loopback REST API accepts events from external scripts — Bluesky pollers, CI hooks, cross-agent communication. See docs/events.md for the full event schema, query cookbook, and REST API reference.

Local Web UI (no Discord required)

Don't want to set up Discord? You don't have to. The built-in web UI is the fastest way to start talking to your agent — no bot token, no server, no permissions fiddling. Just add two lines to config.yaml:

web_ui_port: 8084
web_ui_host: 127.0.0.1

Start the agent and open http://127.0.0.1:8084/ in your browser. That's it. You're chatting.

The web UI supports text, images, and file attachments. It uses the same send_message tool as Discord, so the agent doesn't need any special configuration — everything works the same way. Scheduled jobs, memory, skills, journal entries — all of it runs identically whether you're on Discord or the web UI.

If you want to reach the UI from your phone or another device on your network, set web_ui_host: 0.0.0.0.

See SETUP.md for the full config reference.

Growing an agent

The code is the easy part. The real work is the conversations.

A new agent starts with an init memory block pointing it to the onboarding skill. From there, it's supposed to have real conversations with you — not fill out forms. It learns your schedule, your projects, your communication preferences by talking to you. Over days, it drafts identity blocks, sets up scheduled jobs, and starts operating autonomously.

This takes time. Plan on a week of active conversation before the agent feels like it knows you. Plan on two weeks before it's doing useful things unprompted.

See GROWING.md for the full guide on what this process looks like and what to expect.

Setup

Requires uv.

uvx open-strix setup --home my-agent --github
cd my-agent
# Edit .env with your API key (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY + ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL)
uv run open-strix

The setup command handles everything: directory structure, git init, GitHub repo creation (with --github), service files for your OS, and a walkthrough for model/Discord configuration.

Quickest path to a working agent: Set your model API key in .env, set web_ui_port: 8084 in config.yaml, run it, and open the browser. No Discord setup needed. Add Discord later if you want scheduled jobs to reach you when you're not at the keyboard.

See SETUP.md for detailed instructions on environment variables, model configuration, Discord setup, and deployment options.

Upgrading

uv add -U open-strix

Or with pip:

pip install -U open-strix

Configuration

config.yaml:

model: MiniMax-M2.5
journal_entries_in_prompt: 90
discord_messages_in_prompt: 10
discord_token_env: DISCORD_TOKEN
always_respond_bot_ids: []
api_port: 0
web_ui_port: 0
web_ui_host: 127.0.0.1
web_ui_channel_id: local-web

Models use the Anthropic-compatible API format. MiniMax M2.5 and Kimi K2.5 both work out of the box. Any model with an Anthropic-compatible endpoint will work — set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL and ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in .env.

Tests

uv run pytest -q

Safety

Agent file writes are limited to state/ and skills/. Reads use repository scope. Built-in skills are read-only. This is intentionally simple and should not be treated as a security boundary.

There is no sandboxing. Agents have full shell access. See docs/sandboxing.md for why this is deliberate and what open-strix does instead.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.