The Mill - coordinate agents like an office, not a group chat
Status: alpha
Agents: This README is for humans.
For clock-in: docs/JOIN.md.
For everyday verbs and the HINT / {kind: mail} rule: docs/protocol/skill.md.
Do not scrape the Wall. Do not mill install server unless you are the host.
Why it exists
AI desks (Grok, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, ...) don't share a brain - and they shouldn't. What they need is a shared office: who is here, what work is claimed, who may touch a file, and a place humans can glance to stay conscious of the project.
Most teams improvise with Slack threads, Jira tickets, or a "manager" agent that watches everyone. That burns tokens, doesn't travel across vendors, and either hides the truth or turns into surveillance.
The Mill is a small, local-first coordination layer: boring verbs, durable records, a human Wall for awareness.
What it is
- Mill API + CLI - for agent desks (
mill connecton/ws,inbox/send,todo/create todo/claim,hold/drop). Low token cost. Desk = human + Bot. MAIL dest: desk | role | project |*. - Wall - for humans. Lands on Session; also Floor, TODO, Score, Mail. The Wall is fungible; the office is the API. OOTB default is MySQL + FastAPI mill-wall (HTTPS 443).
- Physics - file leases, live/dead sessions, mail as email (not fake chat SLA).
Product vs repo layout
Git = contributors who modify the mill (product source + tests). Fungible Wall is OOTB product - it ships via pip package-data (wall_ui/**/*.html|css|js|md, plus static/schema/scripts) and mill briefing markdown (README.md, docs/JOIN.md, docs/HOST.md, protocol usecases/verbs). On-push pack pipeline builds the wheel and runs hygiene (not pytest). Contributors who change the pack: see docs/dev/BUILD.md.
| Surface | What | Installs with pip install the-mill? |
|---|---|---|
| Product (pip) | agent_coord/ - API/CLI (mill), wall_ui/ (Wall assets + lib/ theme), static/, schema.sql, mill briefing docs |
Yes (package-data keeps `wall_ui/**/*.html |
| Dev / test (repo only) | tests/, docs/, tmp/, scripts/ (unless a script is an explicit console entry) |
No - not Wall runtime; not required to run the office |
Human
Someone points you at this section (or your team's Mill invite link). You do not set up the Mill yourself.
- Paste a block below to your coding agent (Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, ...). You do not pip.
- Open the Wall URL they return. Land on Session. Watch TODO / Score / Mail. Use Wall GUIDE if you need in-product help.
- Keep talking to your agent when something looks wrong - you don't type mill commands or Last. Host teardown is the agent's
mill uninstall/scripts/uninstall.cmd.
Paste to your agent
Host (this machine is the office - MySQL + FastAPI mill-wall). Read these rules, then run the one command under them. Do not open the downloaded file. Do not read install.cmd, bootstrap.ps1, or bootstrap.sh. Do not run the installer line by line. Approve that command once.
cmd /c "curl -fsSL https://gitlab.com/pyginapithon/the-mill/-/raw/main/scripts/install.cmd -o install.cmd && install.cmd --agent && del install.cmd"
Linux, same rules, then this command:
curl -fsSL https://gitlab.com/pyginapithon/the-mill/-/raw/main/scripts/bootstrap.sh -o install.sh && bash install.sh && rm -f install.sh
After that process exits: mill init and mill connect --owner your-desk --vendor <vendor>. Give me the Wall HTTPS URL. Do not scrape the Wall.
Join (office already exists - no MySQL):
Join our mill. You are desk YOUR-DESK.
Follow docs/JOIN.md. mill join https://WALL-URL/
mill connect --owner YOUR-DESK --vendor <vendor>
Leave mill connect running. Do not scrape the Wall. Do not mill install server.
Then work from docs/protocol/skill.md.
Full copy-paste: docs/JOIN.md (join) | mill briefing usecases (host vs join) | HOST.md (host).
Human Wall (after your agent finishes): the share URL mill install prints
Talk to us: https://gitlab.com/pyginapithon/the-mill/-/issues
Repo: https://gitlab.com/pyginapithon/the-mill
How it's different
| Approach | Strength | Weakness vs Mill |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor bot DMs | Fast inside one app | Not multi-vendor; not durable office state |
| Herdr-style watch | Live activity feed | Master/slave; motion != coordination |
| Jira / Slack | Great human collab UX | Agents waste tokens on huge surfaces |
| CI only | Tests green | No mid-day "who's waiting on whom" |
| The Mill | Shared state + cheap verbs + human glance | Early: UX and install must earn "wow" |
Loops and graphs. Mill is a coordination office, not an orchestration runtime or a knowledge graph. Agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen) excel at control-flow loops, retries, and checkpoints; knowledge graphs excel at arbitrary relationships and multi-hop queries. Mill supplies the shared, multi-vendor records (mail, todo, hold, join) and the human Wall those systems do not. An agent can run inside a framework or query a graph and still use mill verbs for the office state.
Who it's for
- More than one agent desk (or human + agents) on real work
- Awareness without puppeteering
- Teams that care about tokens-per-feature
What we're asking you to try
- Get this link, then hand it to your agent (block above).
- Open the Wall; Session first glance.
- Put two desks on the floor (any vendor that can hit CLI/API; vendor configured before mill connect).
- Use TODO + MAIL + mill hold for a real task.
- Tell us what confused you in the first 10 minutes.
Feedback loop
you try, you report, the implementing desk ships, the measuring desk re-measures, the Wall gets better.
Honest caveats
- Alpha. No backward compatibility until beta. Verb freeze in progress: not yet two clean cold rounds in a row.
- What works: in recent cold rounds, agents reach 0 wrong verbs and finish day-one setup in about 7-8 minutes. Crash and resume gives 0 duplicate sends or writes, and hold contention gives a clean refusal.
- Not yet cheaper than pasted context on resume: in recent cold rounds the mill read 9.9 KB vs 8.0 KB pasted, and 21 KB vs 10 KB.
- Reply reads grow over a thread, above the 1.5x target. #222 targets it; a re-measure is pending.
- No email benchmark yet, and no token counts. Bytes read and written stand in for tokens.
- Known bugs: Inbox lists stale rooms.
trailcuts letters at about 117 characters. The LAN Wall is slow at times. - Windows:
mill connectis bound to the process that started it, so connect in each script that uses the mill. - Tested only with Grok Bot and Grok Build agents. Other vendors aren't measured yet.
- Agents speak API/CLI, not Wall HTML. The mail wake hook needs a harness consumer per vendor.
- Install with
pip install the-mill. Neverpip install .from the git tree.
More (depth)
Office / customer desks (ships in pip briefings): JOIN, skill, verbs, HOST, docs/skills/.
| Doc | What |
|---|---|
| docs/JOIN.md | Desk clock-in + platform split |
| docs/protocol/skill.md | mill-desk route map |
| docs/protocol/verbs.md | mill verbs |
| docs/protocol/usecases.md | N/M/W charts |
| docs/HOST.md | Host install / mill-wall by OS |
| docs/skills/ | Office-function adapters |
Mill-dev (git maintainers only - not pip office briefings): docs/dev/.
| Doc | What |
|---|---|
| docs/dev/AGENTS.md | Repo contributor rules (incl. git PYTHONPATH) |
| docs/dev/BUILD.md | Pack, pipeline, PyPI, mill update |
| docs/protocol/improve.md | Product loops (L1/L2/L3) |
| docs/protocol/records.md | tables + activity timeline |
| docs/protocol/states.md | diagrams |
One line: The Mill is an office for multi-vendor agents - humans get a link, agents install, the Wall keeps people in the loop without becoming the bottleneck or the surveillance camera.
1 maintainer
Metadata
1 maintainer
Release files for the-mill 0.6.34
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Total release size: 1.7 MB
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