vibey — open-source orchestration for AI coding agents

AI coding agents can write the code. Getting it delivered still takes a person: re-prompting an agent that lost the thread, re-explaining everything after a crash, restarting the run when one vendor's credits give out at 2 a.m.

vibey is a free, open-source orchestrator for AI coding agents — a program that runs a team of them for you. It interviews you until the specification is precise, builds unattended on local or paid agents, stops only for the decisions that are yours, and writes every step to a record that can only be added to — an append-only ledger in a PostgreSQL database — so a crashed or out-of-credit agent's work is picked up again rather than lost.

Never written code? You can still read this. Code is text files of instructions computers run; an AI coding agent is a program that writes and edits that code from plain-English requests; deploying means putting the finished software somewhere people can use it. vibey's job is to manage a team of those agents from your first description to deployed software, the way a project manager runs a team — asking you questions up front, checking the work, and only interrupting you when a decision is truly yours.

Who it is for: developers who already use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or a local model and want finished, reviewed work rather than one session at a time; people who run it for a team on their own hardware or on Kubernetes; and anyone who wants to study or extend a working design for durable, auditable agent orchestration.

What makes it different — each claim links to what proves it:

• A crash loses no job. Jobs are held under expiring leases and reclaimed when a worker dies. A chaos test runs 8 workers through 500 jobs, abandoning each claim with probability 0.2, and passes only if no job is lost or committed twice — the case study tells how.
• The record cannot be quietly rewritten. The database refuses every update and delete to the ledger (ADR-0055), and a SHA-256 hash chain over its events makes any edit visible (ledger_chain.py).
• Local first, paid by choice. The default engine runs GPT-OSS 20B on your own machine through Ollama (ADR-0064); a paid engine runs only when no local one can (ADR-0038).
• You decide what matters. Design, review and deployment wait for your recorded answer, and a waiting question parks its job instead of blocking a worker (ADR-0009).
• Held to gates it cannot talk its way past. vibey's four code layers each need 100% branch coverage to merge (ADR-0023), every hard call is argued in a decision record (77 ADRs), and releases publish through PyPI trusted publishing with no stored token (vibey-engine.yml).

Try it — Python 3.12+ and PostgreSQL 14+, on macOS or Linux:

uv tool install vibey-engine   # or: pipx install vibey-engine
vibey doctor                   # checks engines, local PostgreSQL, and the ledger guard

The full setup is under Install, then Quickstart. Came with a specific problem? What do you want to do? answers six, from running agents on your own hardware to capping what they spend.

Contribute in your first hour. Clone, uv sync --extra dev, run one test, make one small change: the first-hour guide walks it command by command, from a good first issue to your pull request. The project governs itself by written law — start with the Constitution.

Prefer to read first? The design is a research paper — PDF · HTML — and the whole documentation is a book — PDF · EPUB · print.

The project and its engine are vibey; every app and interface a person uses is krypton (sub-doctrine 9.e), whose emblem is the krypton atom: krypton-84, four shells.

For the precise version: a queue-based, six-phase conductor for autonomous software delivery — with an optional visual-design interstitial and opt-in Azure deployment — built on top of the *loop autonomous session runners, which live in this repository as uv workspace members (ADR-0021).

What problem this solves

An autonomous coding session is not autonomous software delivery. A single claudeloop run can finish a task, but it cannot interview you until the spec is sharp, split the work into parallel items, verify each one against gates it cannot game, survive its own credit exhaustion by handing off to a different vendor's engine without losing a single open question, or know that a review finding should reopen design rather than vanish into a transcript.

vibey conducts all of that. You describe what you want; it interviews you until the spec is sharp, builds unattended across a pool of engines with real budget caps, reviews the result with you, and (only if you opt in) deploys. Every choice, finding, and handoff lives in an append-only PostgreSQL ledger — never in one vendor's chat session.

Install

Requires Python 3.12+ and PostgreSQL 14+. Windows is not a supported target. vibey supports every currently supported PostgreSQL major (14–18), and CI runs the database suite against each one. Every database-backed command reads the connection string from VIBEY_PG_URL; vibey never guesses a database and exits with VIBEY_PG_URL is not set when it is missing.

Memory, disk, GPU, network and each krypton client's needs are on the system requirements page. Those figures are re-measured every week, and any figure that could not be re-measured is marked stale. For the sovereign default (a local model), memory is the binding constraint.

Prefer a ready-built file? Every release on GitHub also carries the user interfaces built for each supported platform: krypton desktop for Linux (a Flatpak bundle and an Ubuntu build, x86_64 and arm64), the krypton app for Android and the web, krypton for VS Code, and the Python wheels below, with checksums and build provenance. The downloads page lists each file, what it runs on and whether it is signed.

One install is the whole family: vibey, all five *loop engines, and the tools (vibey-gh, vibey-skills, vibey-bootstrap) ship in the one vibey distribution and land on PATH together (ADR-0037). What each engine still needs separately is its own vendor CLI and credentials — which is what vibey doctor checks.

uv tool install vibey-engine          # or: pipx install vibey-engine / pip install vibey-engine
vibey install --postgres       # install/start local PostgreSQL 18 when needed, then set
                               # the scram-sha-256 pg_hba.conf lines in SECURITY.md §7
export VIBEY_PG_URL=postgresql://vibey_app:change-me@localhost:5432/vibey # the application
# The owner's DSN is given to `vibey migrate` alone, for that one command -- never exported,
# so no worker, engine session or gate command ever holds it:
VIBEY_PG_MIGRATE_URL=postgresql://user@localhost:5432/vibey vibey migrate
vibey doctor                   # pre-flight: engines, and whether the ledger is guarded

Two DSNs, because the ledger is append-only by the database (ADR-0055): the application connects as a role that can read and append to the ledger and nothing more. One DSN still works, but vibey doctor fails its ledger-guard check until the roles are split (database roles).

vibey install --postgres uses Homebrew, apt, or dnf to install and start the current stable PostgreSQL major. vibey doctor reports local PostgreSQL readiness as well as engine health; vibey doctor --install-postgres performs the same explicit installation before checking. --record also writes engine results to the database for a project, and --cluster runs the in-cluster preflight (DSN, workspace, secrets, database, migrations) instead.

gptossloop and qwenloop install with everything else; what is opt-in is the feature, not the install. Each local engine has a switch: gptossloop — the sovereign default on GPT-OSS 20B — is on unless VIBEY_FEATURE_GPTOSSLOOP=0; qwenloop — the same runner on qwen3:14b — needs VIBEY_FEATURE_QWENLOOP=1; and claudeloop-local (claudeloop on a local backend profile) needs VIBEY_FEATURE_CLAUDELOOP_LOCAL=1 (ADR-0064). A switched-on local engine is preferred first for BUILD — a paid engine runs only when no local one is eligible — and vibey doctor lists it; vibey doctor also honours [features] gptossloop = false / qwenloop = true / claudeloop_local = true in a ./vibey.toml. With no --provider, vibey work and vibey worker run DESIGN and DECOMPOSE on the sovereign gptossloop providers too (ADR-0038). VIBEY_OLLAMA_URL is the one endpoint setting; the local models guide has the Ollama recipe.

To add deterministic, budgeted context packets from the vibey-skills marketplace, enable it per project — vibey-skills ships in the same distribution, so there is nothing extra to install:

vibey new my-app --repo ~/src/my-app \
  --skills-context-mode shadow --skills-context-budget 6000

shadow builds and records packet provenance without changing agent prompts. After observing results, switch the project config to inject to append successful packets to BUILD prompts. Missing tools, timeouts, low-confidence retrieval, and insufficient budgets all fall back to the original prompt. The feature is off by default, and wind-down prompts are never modified (ADR-0031).

The same tree is a Claude Code plugin marketplace — every plugin in the family, the 138 skills plugins and vibey-gh's four, from one address and nothing else:

/plugin marketplace add the-vibey-project/vibey
/plugin install security-principles@vibey
/plugin                                    # browse all 142

The root manifest is rendered from the workspace members by vibey-gh marketplace and held to them by vibey-gh check (ADR-0034); it is never edited by hand. Since the family ships as one distribution (ADR-0037) this root manifest is the only marketplace there is.

Quickstart

export VIBEY_PG_URL=postgresql://user@localhost:5432/vibey
vibey new my-app --repo ~/src/my-app \
  --max-cycle-dollars 15                     # real budget brake, enforced from the ledger
vibey doctor --conformance --record          # verify each engine's contract, persist health for the latest project
vibey worker --provider claudeloop \
  --engines claudeloop,agyloop -j 2          # live DESIGN provider; unattended build across the pool

# When vibey parks for your input (design gates, review, budget grants):
vibey gates                                  # each open gate, its prompt, and the command that answers it
vibey answer <gate-id> --defaults            # accept the interview defaults, or:
vibey answer <gate-id> --raw '{"max_dollars": 25}'   # raise a tripped budget cap
vibey design accept <project-id> --no-visual
vibey answer <gate-id> --verdict accept      # review demo
vibey answer <gate-id> --choice local_only   # decline deployment → DONE (local)

vibey doctor --record needs a project to record against, so run it after vibey new. vibey worker defaults to --provider gptossloop, the sovereign DESIGN interview and BUILD decomposition on a local model; pass --provider claudeloop for the same on a paid engine, or --provider scripted for the test double. --provider qwenloop is still accepted and read as gptossloop (ADR-0064). vibey gates lists every open gate with its id, its prompt, and the exact vibey answer command that answers it (vibey gates <project-id> for one project); vibey projects lists your projects, their ids, and how many gates each is waiting on. Both take --json.

The greeter live-demo runbook walks a full paid run end to end, including the zero-touch contracts.

Command reference

Every command's flags and defaults are in the CLI reference. The most common ones:

Configuration

vibey.toml's schema — [project], [isolation], [budget], [engines] (with [engines.claudeloop_local]), [phases.design/build/review], [provision], [deploy], [notifications], [telemetry], [features], [qwenloop], [queue.priority], [queue.reap], and the operational surfaces [tracker], [docs], [secrets], [files], [email], [sms], [messaging], [config_store], [cache], [bus], [blob] and [siem] — is implemented and unit-tested in domain/config.py (parse_config) and infrastructure/config_loader.py. [verify], [gates], [engine_environment], [failover], [hub] and [sabbath] are read by their own loaders. Defaults and an example file are in the configuration reference. The local-engine keys are read at runtime today: [features] gptossloop, [features] qwenloop, [features] claudeloop_local and [engines.claudeloop_local]. vibey doctor and vibey loops read them from ./vibey.toml in the current directory, and the worker reads the same keys from the project's stored config (which no CLI flag sets yet); VIBEY_FEATURE_GPTOSSLOOP, VIBEY_FEATURE_QWENLOOP, VIBEY_FEATURE_CLAUDELOOP_LOCAL and VIBEY_CLAUDELOOP_LOCAL_PROFILE override them. [notifications], [telemetry], [gates] and [engine_environment] are copied from the repository's vibey.toml into the stored project config by vibey new; the worker and lifecycle repository then use those settings. Telemetry is an in-process recorder for now, so it is available to the running app but has no external exporter yet.

What does configure a project today is a handful of vibey new CLI flags (--max-cycles, --max-cycle-dollars, --max-cycle-turns, --skills-context-mode, --skills-context-budget) recorded directly into that project's stored config at creation time — see the CLI reference. The two caps can be changed after that: vibey budget set and vibey budget clear rewrite them in the stored config, record each change on the ledger, and bind the next BUILD session of a worker already running.

Notifications

infrastructure/notify/ implements a NotificationService that dispatches desktop alerts and HMAC-SHA256-signed webhooks (X-Vibey-Signature, see SECURITY.md), and it is covered by tests. build_app() constructs it; workers notify on newly raised gates, and project transitions notify on phase changes and completion. Enable it in the repository TOML with [notifications] enabled = true; vibey new stores that table with the project.

Telemetry

infrastructure/otel.py implements TelemetryTracer (span tracing for jobs, turns, and handoffs) and TelemetryMetrics (engine-selection, queue-latency, phase-duration, handoff-failure, and cost-spend counters), plus calculate_rotation_fairness() for measuring rotation fairness against declared engine weights. It is covered by unit tests and constructed by build_app(). The worker records queue latency, phase duration, and job spans; BUILD records engine turns, selections, handoffs, and cost spend. Set [telemetry] enabled = false to disable those runtime calls for a project.

The shape of it

  DELIVERY STAGE SET
  INTAKE → ① DESIGN ──┬─ no ───────────────→ ② BUILD ⇄ ③ REVIEW
             ▲        │                       autonomous / interactive
             │        └─ yes → [VISUAL DESIGN]
             │                  interactive, media generation + confirmation
             │                            │ visual-ready
             │                            └──────────────→ ② BUILD
             │
             └─ loop-back from ② BUILD or ③ REVIEW: a finding needs clarification

  ③ REVIEW ── no deployment ─────────────────────────────→ DONE (local)
       │ opt in
       ▼
  DEPLOYMENT STAGE SET
  ④ DEPLOY DESIGN → ⑤ DEPLOY EXECUTE → ⑥ DEPLOY REVIEW → DONE (deployed)
       interactive       autonomous          interactive
             ▲                 ▲                    │
             └─────────────────┴────────────────────┘
                  ⑥ can also route a defect back to ①, ②, or ③

The six phases — ① Design · ② Build · ③ Review · ④ Deploy Design · ⑤ Deploy Execute · ⑥ Deploy Review. The circled numbers above are these; bold below means the phase talks to you.

① Design → ② Build → ③ Review → ④ Deploy Design → ⑤ Deploy Execute → ⑥ Deploy Review

Phases 1, 3, 4, and 6 talk to you. The optional Visual Design stage also talks to you and cannot hand work to BUILD until every planned visual is accepted or you explicitly waive the stage. Phases 2 and 5 run unattended, survive rate-limit windows and credit exhaustion, and rotate eligible engines/providers when one runs dry. Phase 3 asks whether to deploy; "no" is a successful local completion. Phase 6 accepts a successful deployment, requests changed deployment details in Phase 4, retries an unambiguous deployment in Phase 5, or routes an application defect back to the appropriate delivery phase.

How it fits together

  you ──► vibey CLI · krypton apps and the VS Code extension (through the hub)
            │ answers to gates               ▲ questions, reviews, budget parks
            ▼                                │
  ┌─────────────────────── vibey conductor ───────────────────────┐
  │  six-phase machine  ·  human gates  ·  budget brake  ·  handoff │
  └──────────┬────────────────────────────────────┬────────────────┘
             │ claims jobs under leases            │ appends every event first
             ▼                                     ▼
   PostgreSQL job queue                 append-only ledger in PostgreSQL
   (FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED)             (no update, no delete; hash-chained)
             │
             ▼ one engine per job, local engines first
   gptossloop · qwenloop · claudeloop-local        on your machine
   claudeloop · codexloop · cursorloop · agyloop   paid, when you allow them
             │
             ▼
   one git worktree per work item ──► your repository

The same picture in words: you talk to vibey through its command line or the krypton apps. The conductor runs the six phases, parks a job whenever it needs your answer, and enforces your budget. Workers claim jobs from a PostgreSQL queue under leases that expire if a worker dies. Every decision, question, answer and handoff is appended to a ledger in the same database before it takes effect, and the database refuses to change or delete what is written there. Each job runs on one engine — a local model first, a paid engine only when no local one can — inside its own git worktree, and finished work lands in your repository. The architecture map shows every layer.

Why it isn't just another agent framework

The hard part is not calling an LLM in a loop — claudeloop and its siblings already solve that, including the distinction between a waitable rate-limit window and exhausted credits that no amount of waiting will fix. vibey adds the things those runners deliberately do not do:

1. A phase machine with loop-backs, so a review finding becomes a new design conversation rather than a lost note.
2. Round-robin engine rotation with lossless handoff — the conversation is an append-only event ledger, not a chat transcript locked inside one vendor's session, so any engine can pick up where any other left off. A handoff that would lose an open question, decision, assumption, or finding is rejected by a pure, deterministic no-loss gate — never silently accepted.
3. A durable queue, so work survives a laptop lid closing, a crash, or a provider outage, and so multiple work items build in parallel in isolated git worktrees.
4. Real money brakes — per-cycle dollar and turn caps summed from the ledger's own cost events, with parks that tell you the exact command to grant more.

Questions people ask

What is vibey?

vibey is a free, open-source orchestrator for AI coding agents: it interviews you until the specification is precise, builds unattended on local or paid agents, stops only for the decisions that are yours, and records every step in an append-only PostgreSQL ledger. It is written in Python, MIT-licensed, and runs on macOS and Linux.

What happens if an AI agent crashes mid-task?

Its job is not lost. A worker holds each job under a lease it must keep renewing; when the worker dies the lease runs out, a reaper returns the job to the queue, and another worker picks it up. A late commit from the dead worker is refused, so the job is not committed twice. Because every question and decision is in the ledger rather than in the dead session, the next engine starts from the same place. The crash case study walks through the design, the chaos test behind it, and what it costs.

Can vibey run without sending code to a cloud model?

Yes. The default engine, gptossloop, runs GPT-OSS 20B on your own machine through Ollama, and with no --provider, the design interview and the work plan run on local models too. To keep every job on your machine, allow only the local engine:

vibey worker --provider gptossloop --engines gptossloop

With that allow-list the only models vibey calls are the ones running on your machine (ADR-0038, ADR-0064).

How does vibey keep an audit trail?

Every decision, question, answer, handoff, cost and phase change is appended to a ledger in PostgreSQL before it takes effect. The database refuses to update or delete a ledger row, and the application connects as a role that could not rewrite one anyway (ADR-0055); a SHA-256 hash chain over the events makes any edit detectable. vibey ledger show reads it, and vibey ledger export publishes a redacted projection (what gets published).

What happens when an engine runs out of credits?

The work moves to another engine; it does not wait. vibey writes a handoff brief and checks it with a deterministic no-loss gate — no model involved — that rejects any brief missing an open question, decision, assumption or finding. A failing brief is retried, then replaced by the full transcript, then brought to you; it is never passed on with gaps (ADR-0004).

Does vibey replace Claude Code, Codex or Cursor?

No — it drives them. Each engine is a *loop runner around a vendor's own tool or a local model (ADR-0001). vibey adds what a single session cannot do: a durable queue, a shared ledger, human gates, budget caps, and rotation between engines.

Where does a person stay in control?

At four gates: the design interview, the review, and the design and review of a deployment. Each one waits for your recorded answer, and vibey gates lists every gate that is open. Budgets cap the dollars and turns each cycle may spend, and a tripped cap parks with the exact command that grants more. Nothing is deployed unless you opt in.

How do I start contributing?

Follow your first hour: clone, install with uv, run a first test, make one small change, and open a pull request into develop. Questions are welcome on Discord and in Discussions.

Documentation

Status

Distance from full autonomy: 1 of 11 stages autonomous (3 partial, 6 manual, 1 unknown), measured at 2026-10-02 01:33Z from the forge, the review canary, the code and the local queue. Not yet autonomous: DESIGN resolves without a person (partial), BUILD runs unattended (unknown), Paid engines stay available (manual), REVIEW resolves without a person (partial), The pull-request review reaches a verdict (manual), Approval comes from the delegated approver (manual), Merges land without the operator (manual), Promotion and release run without hand steps (manual), CI stays green without human re-runs (partial), The queue delivers projects to DONE (manual). Each stage's metric, threshold, evidence and what would close it are on How far vibey is from full autonomy; the record is docs/architecture/evidence/autonomy-scorecard.jsonl. Regenerated by scripts/autonomy_scorecard.py; do not edit inside these markers.

Live-validated. The full pipeline has conducted real paid deliveries end to end: multi-worker builds (-j 2) with cross-engine rotation (claudeloop implements, agyloop verifies), the bounded verify-repair ladder, budget caps tripping and being granted live, and fully zero-touch DESIGN phases answered with nothing but --defaults. The validation campaign's findings — a blind budget brake, a repair-loop livelock, terminal gate-command failures — were each fixed and re-validated live.

Every architectural layer (domain, application, infrastructure, cli) holds a 100% branch-coverage floor, enforced as four separate CI gates (ADR-0023); the absorbed runner and tool packages keep their own gates (ADR-0022). domain/ is pure stdlib, enforced by import-linter and an AST-walking purity test — the no-loss handoff gate is deterministic code, not a model's opinion.

Troubleshooting

Upgrading

From 1.0.0 vibey follows semantic versioning: a change that breaks vibey.toml fields, ledger event shapes, or CLI flags takes a major version. Before upgrading:

1. Read CHANGELOG.md for the versions between your current version and the target.
2. Re-run vibey doctor --conformance --record afterward — engine contracts and conformance checks can gain new checks between releases.
3. The database schema migrates automatically (infrastructure/db/migrator.py); no manual migration step is needed.

Every push to develop publishes a uniquely versioned dev build (X.Y.Z.devN) to TestPyPI; every push to main publishes to PyPI. Two packages publish, each by its own workflow (ADR-0069): vibey-engine, the engine family (vibey-engine.yml), and krypton-app, the apps and the krypton command (krypton-app.yml). After a successful main release, github-release.yml tags that exact commit and creates the matching GitHub Release. Versioning and release are owned by the in-tree vibey-gh; release-please is retired (ADR-0028). uv tool install vibey-engine (or pipx install vibey-engine / pip install vibey-engine) tracks stable releases of the engine family (ADR-0037, ADR-0069); pip install krypton-app adds the apps.

Formal notes

For the reader who wants the theory under the phases. Work items form a queue $Q$ in PostgreSQL; workers claim with SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, so claims serialize per item without global locks: for any item $w$, at most one worker holds $w$ at any instant, while throughput scales with $\min(|Q|, \text{workers})$. The conductor is a six-phase state machine $\Sigma = \langle D, B, R, D_d, D_e, D_r \rangle$ (design, build, review, deploy-design, deploy-execute, deploy-review) with human gates exactly at ${D, R, D_d, D_r}$ — interactive phases are the fixed points where the ledger's open questions must drain to zero before the transition fires. Crash recovery follows from two invariants: every decision, finding, and handoff is a row in an append-only ledger before it takes effect (write-ahead intent), and engine handoff re-derives session context from the ledger alone — so vendor credit exhaustion is a scheduling event, not a loss of state: $\text{state}(t) = f(\text{ledger}_{\leq t})$, independent of any vendor session. The full treatment — with the queue-fairness argument and the gate-soundness proof sketch — is the research paper, Ledger-Mediated Orchestration: Vendor-Independent Autonomous Software Delivery over a Pool of Coding Agents: read it online or download the PDF (source: docs/paper.md). The complete documentation is also a book: PDF · EPUB · print HTML.

Project links

Join the community

vibey is free and open-source software, and it is built in the open. If you write software and want to build the autonomous-delivery stack with us, come and say hello on Discord, and read how to join me. Questions, critiques, pull requests and wild ideas are all welcome.

Related projects

These packages live in this repository as uv workspace members (src/vibey_runners/*, src/vibey_tools/*; ADR-0021). Each keeps its own pyproject.toml, version, Python floor, tests and gates — but none is published separately any more: all nine ship inside the one vibey distribution (ADR-0037), and their former standalone GitHub repositories and PyPI projects no longer exist.

License

MIT © Adam Matthew Steinberger

The short version, again: agents can code, but delivery still meant babysitting them — vibey is the layer that does the babysitting, from sharp spec to deployed software, without losing a single open question.

Your next step: install it and let it interview you —

uv tool install vibey-engine && vibey doctor

Prefer to read first? The design is a research paper (PDF), and the whole documentation is a book (EPUB).

Want to build it with us? Your first hour takes you from a clone to a pull request.