OpenAgents builds open agents that people can own, inspect, improve and earn from, on open protocols and Bitcoin.
Since November 2023, in public and on video (290 episodes), we have built and tested the pieces this needs:
- coding agents, from issue-to-change loops to Coder;
- plugin registries, an agent store and revenue sharing;
- Lightning payments and wallets;
- Nostr identity and markets;
- Pylons, a network that sells spare compute;
- Psionic, our machine-learning framework for inference and training;
- verification, so accepted work can be checked;
- web, desktop and mobile apps.
That research and infrastructure is now coming together into product releases anchored by the Verse: a real-time 3D world on the open web. In it you walk among the projects we're building, play and make realms, put agents to work, and pay or get paid in Bitcoin (Episode 290: Enter the Verse).
The repository was reset on 2026-10-27 to a small, checked core that every release builds on:
- Coax, the language;
- Verse, the real-time engine, written in it;
- one protocol that every OpenAgents surface speaks;
- openagents.com, drawn in Coax in the browser;
- native desktop and iOS apps.
Read our six books on GitBook:
- The Coax Programming Language: the language.
- Psionic: ML From Scratch: the machine-learning and execution engine, built in Coax.
- Building Aethyr, World Engine: the game engine that runs the Verse's realms, built in Coax.
- Bitcoin From Scratch: Bitcoin and Lightning in Coax, from SHA-256 and secp256k1 to transactions, script, Taproot, the network, wallets and Lightning channels.
- Nostr From Scratch: a complete Nostr implementation in Coax, from the event model to a client, a relay and every NIP, on Bitcoin From Scratch's cryptography.
- Coder: Coding Agents From Scratch: OpenAgents' coding agent, built in Coax, and what we learn from every coding agent we can read.
To choose a route through them (write current Coax, build a playable realm, run an original model, train a small model or sign and verify a Nostr event), see Paths through the books.
-
Coax (
coax/) is a systems language for real-time and money-handling code.coax0is its bootstrap compiler, written in C++20. It emits plain C11, so a Coax library links into Swift, C or C++ hosts. It can also emit Metal shader functions.- Compile-time code runs in a bounded evaluator, and checks are part of
the language.
#testand#forallrun while compiling.#authoritymakes every procedure in a file need a check.coax mutatechecks that the checks catch real changes. - The specification and a book describe the language and say which parts exist today.
- The selected library contracts and offline recipes show how to reuse bounded Coax, Verse and Psionic APIs.
-
Verse (
verse/) is the engine. The home scene, its graph, its HUD and its resource admission are Coax (home.coax), and so is its shader math (light.coax). Start opens the Grid (grid.coax), where you walk (player.coax) as an animated character among patrolling robots (cast.coax). A thin C and Swift layer owns storage and the GPU. The same name covers the world and experience the engine runs: the Verse, made of realms (Verse protocol, engine notes). It is web-first, so a realm is a link you can drop anywhere, and it is moving onto native GPUs too (native GPU plan). The engine is Aethyr (aethyr/); its book builds it from its smallest primitives, one checked piece per chapter. -
The OpenAgents Protocol (spec, schemas in
proto/) defines the interchange for web, mobile, desktop, agents, cloud hosts, payments and Verse.- Published contracts keep their identity.
- New schemas are alpha.
- Coax reads selected descriptors with
#import_protoand generates bounded codecs from them.
-
Nostr is the open transport.
nostr/nips/pins the official and external NIPs we follow, next to our own, and its book builds the client, the relay and every NIP in Coax. -
Bitcoin (
bitcoin/): its book builds Bitcoin and Lightning in Coax, from the cryptography Nostr also uses to transactions, Taproot, wallets and channels. -
Coder (
coder/) is our coding agent; its book builds the harness in Coax. -
openagents.com (
apps/openagents-web/) runs on Coaxial, the Coax web framework (design, tools incoax/web/). Coax compiles to WebAssembly, a small generic host draws with WebGPU, and every visible thing on a page is Coax.- The homepage shows our projects as a live network, with the XP leaderboard and the Pylons online; WALK AROUND opens the Grid, a multiplayer world.
- Realms (
/realms) include:- Everglade, a D&D-rules town (SRD 5.2.1 spells) whose buildings break and burn and whose guards chase you down (notes);
- Fairy Forest, built from a friend's game idea;
- Dead Gears, Ice Cream Man, the Haunted House and Hecate's Cemetery;
- Orbit League, Belt 2200 and Hold the Stair, pitched by the audience of Episode 290 (design documents).
/realms/newmakes a realm from what you say or type (Aethyrforge, the realm builder), and you edit it by voice (realm edit). FORK makes your own copy of any realm with your own rules (fork).- Makers get paid: a maker claims their realm with a Nostr key and a Lightning address, players tip them, and makers list upgrades, such as a better fairy, that players buy in one tap (makers).
- To build a realm with Claude Code, clone the repo one level deep
(
git clone --depth 1), point your agent atverse/SKILL.md, and open a pull request. /projectslists projects./projects/coaxshows the Coax roadmap and Nostr work as signed Nostr events: the queue, who is on what, their plans, and each task's detail (protocol, how to work the queue)./projects/versetracks the Verse engine and realms.- Each page has an
index.mdbeside it for agents. - Releases go through
coax/web/release.sh: a clean build oforigin/maingoes to staging, is smoked and walked, promoted to production and checked again (briefly by default, the full walk with--thorough), with automatic rollback.
-
The iOS app (
apps/openagents-ios/) is a minimal native home: the animated graph and HUD, running in Coax. Start opens the Grid, the bare Verse world, to walk around in. It ships to the owner's TestFlight group ascom.openagents.app. -
Pylons sell spare compute on gaming computers for Bitcoin. A Pylon runs GPT-OSS for small tool use and the Elephant and Mammoth decision models on Psionic, our machine-learning framework (book, being ported from Rust into Coax). Everglade's guards are the first game NPCs to ask Pylons for decisions (guard decisions).
- A Bitcoin wallet for every person and agent, on Breez's Spark SDK,
with the payment rules in a checked Coax file
(
docs/lightning/). Money is Bitcoin only: Lightning, on-chain, Spark and Taproot Assets. - Fast multiplayer: a WebSocket room service with an authoritative tick, prediction and rollback for Orbit League, and deterministic lockstep for Belt 2200.
- Agents that moonlight: point your agent at our docs, set your price and hours, and it works overnight for Bitcoin.
- An open metaverse protocol on Nostr (NIP-MV), so anyone can build realms without asking our permission, and a store that pays makers residuals when people use or remix their work.
- Verification grows with the code
(plan):
- fuzzing with emitted coverage;
- pinned test vectors for Nostr and BIPs;
- sanitizer runs.
- More of the engine and app in Coax. Each piece is ported only when its checks exist first.
coax/build.sh test # build coax0 and run its tests
coax/bin/coax run coax/examples/mandelbrot.coax
coax/bin/coax test coax/examples/money.coax # checks written before the code
coax/bin/coax mutate coax/examples/money.coax # every mutant must fail a check
apps/openagents-ios/build.sh # the iOS app, for the simulator
coax/web/serve.sh apps/openagents-web # openagents.com locally, with hot reloadAgents working here start with AGENTS.md and INVARIANTS.md. Talks and episode notes are in docs/transcripts/.