agents.md #

The project is albedo. It is a coding agent daemon written in Gleam on the BEAM, with a detachable native CLI in Go (Charm: bubbletea, lipgloss, bubbles). The daemon owns everything: sessions (each one an actor over a durable, append-only SQLite transcript), the model/tool loop, the provider transport, the extensions that contribute tools and context, and a persistent Python kernel the model drives through cells. The CLI is a thin client: it finds or starts the daemon, then renders. The daemon also serves a local HTTP API that webhooks, the orchestrator view, and the test suites use.

In a checkout the CLI starts the daemon with gleam run (entry: src/albedo.gleam -> albedo/daemon/server). An installed binary launched outside the checkout needs ALBEDO_ROOT pointed at the repo to start a daemon; ./cli/bin/albedo finds the root on its own, and a packaged daemon can be swapped with ALBEDO_DAEMON. Secrets and caches live in $ALBEDO_HOME (default ~/.albedo).

Tooling rules #

The package manager is gleam. Please when you want to add a package, which is never unless told to, do gleam add ... (dev deps: gleam add --dev ...), please do not try to edit manifest.toml yourself. Gleam generates it.

PLEASE USE gleam check to type check and gleam format src test to format Gleam. Python is formatted with ruff format priv/python test, linted with ruff check, and type-checked with ty check. Both checks cover priv/python and all Python files in test, including manual tools; settings live in pyproject.toml. Ruff, ty, and Pyright target Python 3.11. The Nix development shell and packaged daemon use Python 3.11. nix develop puts Ruff and ty on PATH. Outside it, use uvx ruff@0.15.14 check and uvx ty@0.0.84 check, matching the pre-commit pins. pre-commit run --all-files formats Gleam and Python, checks Python lint, and runs ty across the project. The commit hook formats staged files and runs both Python checks. nix fmt also applies Ruff lint fixes.

For Go changes, run gopls with staticcheck and all available analyses enabled, alongside vet and tests. Fix diagnostics by simplifying the code, without adding wrappers or obscuring control flow.

• Gleam lint: test/gleam-lint.sh (pinned glinter in nix develop; eleven focused rules also run in pre-commit and test.sh; manual review and audit profiles are documented in robot-docs/gleam-lint.md)
• Keep generated lint reports under /tmp. Never commit CSV audit inventories or retrospective cleanup reports.
• Gleam suites: gleam test
• Go: go -C cli vet ./... and go -C cli test ./...
• Rust (optional view renderer): cargo test --release --locked --manifest-path native/render/Cargo.toml
• Everything that must pass before a commit: ./test.sh

Anything that opens a browser must set ALBEDO_NO_BROWSER=1; test.sh exports it for the whole gate.

Test layout and the build lock #

./test.sh is the gate. The quick checks run first, in order (Ruff lint and format checks, ty, Gleam format and lint checks, cargo test + renderer install, Go vet, the CLI build the Python e2e suite drives); then it compiles the daemon once and runs every suite at the same time (gleam test, each test/harness/*_test.py, Go unit tests, the Go e2e suite, the Python e2e suite), each into its own log, printed only when that suite fails.

The e2e suites compile the daemon once per run with test/snapshot-daemon.sh (test.sh does it once for both and passes ALBEDO_TEST_DAEMON) and boot every test daemon from that copy through ALBEDO_DAEMON, never through gleam run, so their daemons neither queue on gleam's build lock nor see a rebuild mid-run. The one compile still takes the lock, which gleam test holds for its whole run: an e2e suite started from inside gleam test deadlocks, and one started beside it waits for it to finish. The Python e2e suite drives the prebuilt cli/bin/albedo binary; the Go e2e suite builds its own CLI and runs with -count=1, because it boots a hermetic daemon and must never reuse a cached run or a stale binary.

Test placement (expanded rules in .agents/skills/writing-tests/SKILL.md): the default is an end-to-end scenario through the real daemon on the shared harness in test/e2e/ — a scripted fake model provider, one shared daemon for the tests that isolate themselves by session, workspace and provider profile, and a fresh daemon for each @exclusive test that changes global state or restarts it. Unit tests are the exception; each module docstring must say which bug it catches that E2E cannot. test/harness/api_docs_test.py is the invariant test to imitate: it builds the model's real Python namespace and fails whenever a public binding exists that the model is never told about. test/manual/ is opt-in (needs a provider, a PTY, or benchmark artifacts) and is never part of the gate.

Committing and pushing #

Other sessions and agents often work in this checkout at the same time. Stage only the paths you changed (git add -- <paths>), leave other files alone, and never stash someone else's changes.

If "push" could mean main, a branch, or a pull request, ask which before pushing.

A push that fails with tangled's too many concurrent operations from your address is a rate limit, not a rejection: retry after about 15 seconds.

src/ — the daemon (Gleam) #

• src/albedo/daemon/ — session actors and durable state: submission/run/turn plumbing (session_*.gleam), the append-only transcript and conversation store (SQLite via sqlight), the event bus, projections, the family (agents, mail, bus), folders, quota, usage, the reaper, persisted settings, the image store, and server.gleam, the HTTP entry point.
• src/albedo/daemon/migrations/ — existing SQLite upgrades, with ordered startup data steps in daemon/migrations.gleam; schema additions remain called from owning initialisers (see robot-docs/migrations.md).
• src/albedo/harness/ — the model-facing half: loop.gleam (the tool loop), tool.gleam, extension.gleam and extensions.gleam (plugin interfaces and composition), compaction.gleam, runtime.gleam (boots the built-ins), plus credentials, oauth, rotation, session settings mutations, shared settings persistence, extension settings, and the usage feed.
• src/albedo/harness/extensions/ — one directory per extension. Enabled by default: python, run, work, mail, agents, schedule, paperclips, files, memory, links, instructions, commands, skills, models, openai, codex, antigravity, alibaba, claude, rolling, snapcompact-memory, lcm-memory, notes, remote, browser. Installed but off until enabled: mcp, view, proxy, webhooks, warm, snapcompact, lcm. The provider extensions are ordered before models on purpose (their own model lists win), and the memory/compaction pairs are ordered so archives cover past folds.
• src/albedo/openai_api/ — the provider transport every extension shares: request/turn types, SSE framing, stream reducers, replay after restarts, chat/responses encodings. A provider with a foreign wire format encodes an openai_api.Exchange and supplies only its own reducer (antigravity does this); HTTP, retries, limits, and callbacks stay shared.

The extension record is the core abstraction everything composes through:

extension.Extension(
  name: "project-context",
  description: "workspace instructions for the model",
  requires: [],
  plugins: [extension.ContextPlugin(load: load_workspace_context)],
  initialise: fn(_) { Ok(Nil) },
)

An extension bundles plugins: context (system instructions), tool (model tools + Python modules + host routes), command (one definition drives the CLI menu, user invocation, and the kernel's typed commands bindings), managed (stateful contributions that observe session events), models/model-provider (catalog, wire protocol, login), service (HTTP under /<extension>/), migration (extension-owned SQLite upgrades applied by the host), compaction, and fold. Selection is per session through /extensions; at most one compaction strategy may be enabled, and changes require an idle session.

cli/ — the terminal (Go) #

• cli/cmd/albedo — production wiring, project-root discovery, and final error reporting
• cli/internal/cli — Cobra constructors, strict argument validation, and command rendering
• cli/internal/app — typed session, prompt, model, and daemon workflows with lazy connections
• cli/internal/terminal — TTY detection, confirmation, migration notices, and Bubble Tea launch
• cli/internal/storage — offline usage inspection and approved cleanup plans with revalidation
• cli/internal/config — connection home, settings value types, and immediate form validation
• cli/internal/daemon — daemon lifecycle (find or start, auth token) and the typed API client
• cli/internal/tui — the bubbletea UI: chat, model picker, orchestrator view, page screens, forms
• cli/test/e2e — the Go e2e suite against the real binary and a hermetic daemon

priv/ and native/ #

• priv/python/ — the actual Python kernel: albedo_kernel.py (cell execution, persistent namespace), albedo_proc.py/albedo_shell.py (run jobs), albedo_api.py, albedo_trace.py, and albedo_plugins/. The daemon boots this per session; changes apply to new kernels.
• priv/linguist/ — GitHub's language data for file detection (harness/languages.gleam)
• priv/cache-ttl.json — the prompt-cache TTL prior table (see robot-docs/cache-ttl.md)
• native/render/ — optional Rust renderer behind the view extension, which shows the model its changes as highlighted images for the final review pass. Install with native/render/install.sh; needs cargo.

robot-docs/ #

robot-docs/ is one model-facing doc per subsystem (agents, auth, settings, kernel-state, migrations, cache-ttl, cache-warming, commands, compaction, context, extensions, files, kernel, mcp, models, paperclips, provider-requests, proxy, quota, skills, usage-feed, webhooks, workspaces). This file is the map; those are the details. When you change a subsystem's behavior, update its doc in the same change; when you need to understand one, read it there first.

Read the page for a subsystem before you edit it, and name the module that owns the behavior before you write it. Ownership rules live in those docs (an extension owns its own migrations and tables; the daemon only collects them), and the mistakes that cost the most were ones a doc already ruled out. Use the design-preflight skill for anything beyond a small change.

Other directories #

• test/ — e2e/ (default suite, shared harness), harness/ (invariant and logic unit tests, Gleam and Python), daemon/ (Gleam daemon suites), openai_api/ (transport), manual/ (opt-in)
• flake/, default.nix — nix packaging and dev shell (nix develop ships gleam, go, cargo, python, and pre-commit); nix build .#albedo produces a self-contained package
• .agents/skills/ — repo-local agent skills (writing-tests, charm-tui, gleam-design, tg)
• priv/skills/ — skills shipped with albedo (customize-albedo, research, orchestrating-agents, complexity-review, design-preflight); a same-named skill in a project or home directory replaces one