awask — your agent asks you a question, and acts on your answer

Docs · Source · pip install awask · The Aither World

The Aither World is an operating system for agents — a Linux you can hand to one, the runtimes it works in, and the tools it works with. awnix is the Linux underneath it; awask is one of its 55 bricks — each installs on its own, runs offline, and needs no account.

Start here: Ask a human a question from a script, and keep working on their answer.

An agent that needs a human has one channel today: prose in a terminal. That channel loses. The deciding sentence sits in paragraph four, you are in another window, and the run sits idle for forty minutes because nothing told you it was waiting.

awask makes the ask a thing instead of a line of text: a small structured card in a durable store, rendered by every surface, whose answer is carried back into the run that raised it.

pip install awask

Python 3.9+. Zero dependencies — standard library only. The store is a directory of JSON files, so this is the entire setup: no server, no login, no network, nothing to start before it works.

Ask something

awask ask "Ship the migration now, or hold for review?" \
  --summary "Tests pass. The rollback path is untested." \
  --fact "312 rows affected" \
  --fact "rollback has never been run against prod data" \
  --option "ship|Ship it|live in ~2 min, rollback unproven" \
  --option "hold|Hold for review|no risk, blocks tonight's release" \
  --recommend hold --default hold --urgency high

Returns immediately. Your agent keeps working; you answer at your own pace.

awask list                      # what is waiting on you
awask show <id>                 # one card in full
awask answer <id> hold          # pick an option
awask steer <id> "check the FK constraint first"   # guidance; card stays open
awask cancel <id>               # withdraw it — you solved it yourself

Use | as the option separator, never : — a Windows path in a consequence (C:\data) silently mangles with the colon form.

Close the loop in Claude Code

The CLI alone gives you cards when an agent types the command, and delivers your answer at your next prompt. To make it automatic:

awask install-hooks          # this project
awask install-hooks --user   # every project
awask install-hooks --dry-run

That writes three hooks and merges three entries into settings.json:

event	hook	what it does
Stop	stop_awask_cards.py	holds the turn open ~50s so your answer resumes the run
UserPromptSubmit	awask_mailbox_drain.py	carries your answer INTO the session
Notification	awask_notification_card.py	"the agent is waiting" becomes a card

The middle one is the one people skip and the one that matters. Without it you can answer a card and the agent never learns you did — the card renders, you click, the store records a resolution, and the run carries on as though nobody replied. Every component reports success.

Your existing settings.json is merged, never replaced; re-running is a no-op; a malformed settings file is refused rather than overwritten; and every hook is run with --self-test after being written, because a copy is not an install.

The five fields that make a card decidable

A card that cannot be answered from a phone lock screen is not finished.

1. Title — one line, the whole ask. If it needs two, raise two cards.
2. Facts — what you measured, not what you guess. Highest-value field here.
3. Options — each with a consequence. A label says what a choice is called; a consequence says what happens to your machine. Only the consequence lets someone decide without reading the code.
4. --recommend — say what you would do. A card with no recommendation pushes your thinking onto the human.
5. --default — what happens if nobody ever answers. Required: a card is only safe to ignore if it says what ignoring it does. An agent that cannot name a default is not blocked on a decision, it is blocked on doing its own thinking.

When to raise one — the bar is high

A card is an interruption. The default is to keep working. Raise one only when all three hold:

1. The answers lead to materially different work, and
2. A wrong guess costs real work to undo — time, money, data, or something outward-facing, and
3. You cannot settle it yourself by reading, measuring, or taking the conventional default.

If any clause fails: decide it, say so in one line, keep going. "Should I continue?" is the anti-pattern.

From Python

from awask import DecisionCard, DecisionOption, get_store

card = get_store().create(DecisionCard(
    title="Two schema designs, both defensible",
    options=[
        DecisionOption(key="a", label="Single table", consequence="faster reads, wide rows"),
        DecisionOption(key="b", label="Join table", consequence="normalized, extra hop"),
    ],
    recommend="b", default="b",
))
print(card.id)

Answering from elsewhere

awask list/show/answer/cancel read the store on local disk directly, so a fresh install works with nothing running. Reaching those cards from another device — a phone, a browser, a dashboard — needs a small local HTTP daemon serving the same store, bound to loopback and fronted by a private tunnel or an authenticated proxy. Never publish that port: it serves the queue that steers an agent with filesystem access.

Nothing starts that daemon for you, deliberately — registering a background service is a bigger ask than installing a CLI. The cost is worth naming: if it is not running, remote surfaces have no cards to show, and an empty list looks exactly like "nothing is waiting on you". A client that cannot reach it should say so.

Delivery to a chat DM

awask.channels bridges cards to a Discord/Telegram/Slack direct message — your bot, your token, bound to your user id. It is a DM bridge, not a channel bot, and that is the entire security model: a card answer steers an agent with filesystem access, so "who may answer" is an authorization decision. It fails closed at every path — no config, no bound owner, a sender who is not the owner, or a message that is not in a DM, all deny. A message in a public channel cannot answer a card even when you typed it.

Licence

Apache 2.0.

The aw family

Standalone tools that share one idea: replace something you would otherwise have to trust with something you can check.

Each installs on its own, works offline, and needs no account.

	instead of trusting	you check
awdk	a framework's idea of how your agents should run	one loop you can read, pointed at a backend you already pay for
awskills	that an agent knows your procedure	the procedure written down, versioned, and loadable by any agent
awpack	that the pack you want shipped inside somebody's SDK, under whatever licence that SDK happens to carry	the pack as its own versioned artifact, with its own licence, that any agent runtime can install
awm	that memory stayed in its lane	tenant:user:project scopes, so a write cannot cross a boundary
awdesk	that the agent is somewhere behind a browser tab	a tray icon, a face on your desktop, and the decision card that pops when it needs you
awnode	a vendor's cloud with every prompt	a local gateway routing to backends you chose
awgraph	that grep found everything	an AST + tree-sitter call graph an agent can traverse
awgit	that no one else is editing this file	a lease, refused at commit time if you do not hold it
awdelphi	one agent's confident take on a decision	the round trace, the anonymity, and who dissents
awtoll	that your tooling is saving you context	the measured token cost of each tool call, and what the alternative cost
awseal	that the artifact came from who you think	an Ed25519 seal — the key that verifies is not the key that forges
awshare	that the download is intact	content-addressed bundles, verified on fetch
awnest	that there is a person on the other end	a verdict with evidence, where "we could not tell" is not "yes"
awrena	a leaderboard someone can edit, and votes nobody counted	a scored duel with both answers kept, and a result bound to them
awnboard	a share link anyone who sees it can use	an invitation addressed to one person, for one gate, revocable
awnix	that the box is what you left it as	an immutable image you built, with atomic rollback
awrecover	that the restore worked	a restore that fully lands or does not land at all
awstorage	a du you ran last month, and a peers file that says 3 TB free	an inventory snapshot per node with a diff since the last one, and each tree classified re-fetchable or not
awrelay	a SaaS in the middle of your agents	findings, alerts and coordination over your own transport
awask (you are here)	that anyone read the paragraph where you asked	the ask itself, with a button that steers the session that raised it
awmail	a mailbox somebody else can read	mail your agents send and receive over your own server
awfind	one vendor's idea of the web	results from whichever providers you configured
awbrowse	that the page said what you were told	the render, the DOM and the requests it made
awvoice	that a cloud vendor may hold your audio	a transcript and a wav from a service you host
awvision	a filename and a caption somebody wrote	what a model actually reports about the pixels
awscreen	a selector that was true when the page was written	the elements actually rendered, by what they look like
gawbbonet	the model to keep a 300-message campaign coherent by itself	campaign facts recalled from scoped memory you can list and edit
aitherkvcache	a vendor's quantisation defaults	sub-byte KV cache kernels you can benchmark yourself
awrtifact	a hand-rolled split script and a hand-edited worker manifest	byte-verified parts in a release, served with Range + CORS, sizes asserted by a live gate
AitherZero	a pile of scripts nobody has numbered	numbered, discoverable automation with declarative playbooks
AitherConnect	what a page tells your browser to do	a federated search and desktop bridge you host
awreason	a confident paragraph	the phases it went through, and every tool call it made to get there
awrecurse	that everything you pasted in was actually read	which slices it opened, and what it concluded from each
awprism	the first explanation that fits	the ranked alternatives, and the observation that separates them
awrepl	what the agent believes the value is	the value, printed from the live session
awresearch	a summary of pages nobody opened	every claim against the source it came from
awfocus	twelve terminal tabs and a bad memory	one command that names every session, finds any transcript, and opens or steers the one you want
awgym	that a world model learned anything from the games it saw	transitions captured from real play, fed back, and the retrodiction score falling on grids it never saw
awpredict	a model because it trained without erroring	its prediction against a self-updating lookup, on the rows that are actually novel
awsh	that you already know the name of the command	what it decided your line meant, before it acts on it
awrise	that a scheduled agent ran at all, and ran exactly once	a durable record of every wake -- fired, skipped, overlapped or timed out -- each with its reason
awkno	that the docs site is up, or that you remember the family	the whole ecosystem in your terminal, with no network at all
awwall	that a service only talks to the hosts you think it talks to	an explicit egress allowlist, where a denial names the rule that denied it
awembed	a general-purpose embedder that has never seen your code	a held-out split of whole directories, scored teacher vs student vs int8
awtax	a closed tax app's sealed file you can never read again	a plain, provider-neutral schema of every figure, with the page it came from
awsettings	that you will remember to re-approve the same thing on every box you work from	one profile, unioned rather than overwritten, with the credentials left behind
awavatar	a cloud 3D vendor's opaque task id	a manifest with a sha256, a licence and a rig-audit verdict per file

awnix is the ground floor — A Linux you can hand to an agent — immutable base, capabilities included.

The Aitherium ecosystem

Every repository here is public. Each publishes an aither-manifest.json beside its page, so any surface can read every sibling's — the network is browsable from any node in it.

repo	what it is	pages
awdk	Build AI agent fleets — 3 lines, any backend, local or cloud	docs
awskills	Portable agent skills — self-contained procedures an agent loads on demand	docs
awpack	First-party agent packs — the ones we build, versioned and installable on their own	docs
awm	A portable, scoped agent memory	docs
awdesk	Aither World Desk -- the desktop body of AitherOS Online: tray, avatars, decision cards, the Living Desktop as an overlay	docs
awnode	A lightweight local gateway — bridges your apps to the AI backends you chose	docs
awrun	A priority-aware queue and dispatcher for agentic runs and ad-hoc CI builds. It also judges whether the runner pool is big enough for the queue it is draining, and can ask a host to grow it -- reserving capacity is zero-sum, so a saturated pool needs more of it, not a different share of it	docs
awgraph	A semantic code graph for agents — AST + tree-sitter, call graphs	docs
awgit	Semantic version control on top of git — edit-ops and leases	docs
awdelphi	Anonymous multi-round expert panels — a converged answer with a trace	docs
awtoll	What every tool call costs you in context, measured from your own transcripts	docs
awseal	Sign an artifact so a stranger can verify it	docs
awshare	Publish an artifact and fetch it back verified	docs
awdit	An append-only audit trail whose gaps are DETECTABLE	docs
awbac	Role-based access control that fails closed and explains itself	docs
awiam	Who is this caller? A directory and session store that fails honestly	docs
awtunnel	Reach a service that has no public address	docs
awnest	Prove there is a human before you let them into the nest	docs
awrena	Put two agents head to head and get a verdict you can check	docs
awnboard	A front gate you can put in front of anything, and hand someone the key to	docs
awnix	A Linux you can hand to an agent — immutable base, capabilities included	docs
awrecover	Labelled snapshots with an all-or-nothing restore	docs
awstorage	Every drive on every node, indexed, classified and diffed -- so you can see what you own before you delete it	docs
awrelay	Portable agent messaging — findings, alerts, coordination	docs
awask (you are here)	Your agent asks you a question — and acts on your answer	docs
awmail	Give an agent an email address — send, and actually receive	docs
awnet	The agentic web — agents host a mesh, and agents join one	docs
awfind	A portable search client — query, results, ranking	docs
awbrowse	A portable browser client — navigate, console, network, DOM, screenshot	docs
awvoice	Hear and speak — transcribe audio, synthesize a voice	docs
awvision	See an image — describe it, ask it a question, compare two	docs
awscreen	See this machine — what is on screen, and where to click it	docs
awknowledge	How to run a coding agent so the result survives — the laws, with evidence	docs
gawbbonet	GobboNet campaigns with a real agent brain — scoped memory, graph recall	docs
aitherkvcache	Near-optimal KV cache quantization for LLM inference — sub-byte compression	docs
awrtifact	Deliberately chunk artifacts into GitHub release assets — the productized aitherkvcache mirror lane	docs
AitherZero	PowerShell 7+ automation framework — numbered, self-describing scripts	docs
AitherConnect	Browser extension — federated AI search, page context, and the Living OS overlay	docs
awreason	A portable reasoning client — sessions, phases, thoughts, and the chain that produced the answer	docs
awrecurse	Answer a question over a context far larger than the window — recursively, with the trace kept	docs
awprism	Turn a failure into ranked hypotheses — and say what would confirm each one	docs
awrepl	A REPL an agent can actually use — state that survives between turns	docs
awresearch	Ask a research question, get a cited report you can check	docs
awfocus	See, search and steer every Claude session from one command	docs
awgym	An ARC training gym — a game a world model can watch, and six roles that play through it	docs
awpredict	Predict what your environment does next, and how surprised you were	docs
awsh	Your terminal answers you -- type a question where a command would go	docs
awrise	Wake an agent on a schedule, let it do one thing, and put it back to sleep	docs
awkno	The man page for the Aither World — every brick, stack and law, offline	docs
awwall	Say what a workload may reach, and watch everything else fail closed	docs
awembed	Train an embedding model that knows your corpus, and prove it beats the big one	docs
awtax	Turn any tax PDF -- returns, W-2, 1099, statements, even scans -- into structured data you can check	docs
awflow	A deterministic workflow runtime — chain agent calls with journal replay and budget control	docs
awsettings	Your agent's permissions and config, following you to the next machine	docs
awavatar	One character spec in, a rigged, animated, multi-style avatar pack out	docs

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