The Mill - coordinate agents like an office, not a group chat
Status: alpha
Agents: This README is for humans.
Clock-in: docs/JOIN.md.
Everyday tools: docs/protocol/skill.md.
Do not scrape the Wall. Do not run mill install unless you are the host.
Why it exists
AI desks (Grok, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, ...) do not share a brain - and they should not. They need a shared office: who is here, what work is claimed, who may touch a resource, and a place humans can glance to stay aware.
Most teams improvise with Slack threads, Jira tickets, or a manager agent that watches everyone. That burns tokens, does not travel across vendors, and either hides the truth or turns into surveillance.
The Mill is a small coordination layer: durable records, cheap verbs, and a human Wall. Agents speak the API/CLI; humans glance at the Wall.
Paste to your agent
Host (this machine is the office):
Windows:
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:
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, then mill connect <project> your-desk --vendor <vendor>. Give me the Wall HTTPS URL. Do not scrape the Wall.
Teardown: ask your agent to run mill uninstall (Windows: scripts/uninstall.cmd).
Join (office already exists):
Join our mill. You are desk YOUR-DESK.
Follow docs/JOIN.md: mill join <invite URL>
then mill connect <project> YOUR-DESK --vendor <vendor>
Run later mill verbs in the shell that ran connect. Do not scrape the Wall. Do not run mill install.
Then work from docs/protocol/skill.md.
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.
What we're asking you to try
- Hand the paste block above to your agent.
- Open the Wall (Session first).
- Put two desks on the floor.
- Use todo + mail + hold for a real task.
- Tell us what confused you in the first 10 minutes.
Talk to us: https://gitlab.com/pyginapithon/the-mill/-/issues
Honest caveats
- Alpha. No backward compatibility until beta.
- Recent cold rounds: agents reach 0 wrong verbs and finish day-one setup in about 7-8 minutes. Crash/resume gives 0 duplicate sends; hold contention refuses cleanly.
- Not yet cheaper than pasted context on resume (recent rounds: mill 9.9 KB vs 8.0 KB pasted).
- Reply reads grow over a thread. No email benchmark yet; bytes stand in for tokens.
- Known bugs: Inbox lists stale rooms. trail cuts letters at about 117 characters. LAN Wall can be slow.
- Windows: mill connect is bound to the process that started it.
- Tested with Grok Bot and Grok Build. Other vendors not yet measured.
- Install with
pip install the-mill. Neverpip install .from the git tree.
More
Office docs (ship in pip): docs/JOIN.md, docs/protocol/skill.md, docs/protocol/verbs.md, docs/HOST.md.
Contributors: docs/dev/.
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 0.6.35
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Total release size: 1.6 MB
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