Docs · Source · pip install awkno · 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; awkno is one of its 55 bricks — each installs on its own, runs offline, and needs no account.
Start here: Ask it what a brick does and get the answer with your network cable out.
Every brick, stack, and law in your terminal, offline.
awkno is a standalone reference for the Aither World ecosystem — the set of portable, composable tools and principles that make agent automation reproducible and auditable. No browser, no internet connection, no external dependencies needed.
Agent systems need documented principles. The Aither World is built on 18 laws derived from real failures on production systems — lessons about gates, silence, atomicity, and delivery that apply to every agent work you build.
The ecosystem itself is ~36 portable tools (bricks) organized into thematic stacks. awkno brings them all into your terminal: any brick's purpose and adoption path, any law's principle and reasoning, any stack's composition and status — all offline, all fast, queryable by keyword, and open to reading and redistribution.
pip install awkno# Show a brick
awkno awdk
awkno awsh
# Show a law
awkno law 5
# List everything
awkno list
# Search for a term
awkno search agent
awkno -k silence
# Raw output for piping
awkno awdk --plain
awkno --json awdkawknoShows the overview: command summary, quick start examples, and how to explore further.
Portable, single-purpose tools that do one job well and compose with others:
- awdk — Build AI agent fleets (3 lines, any backend)
- awskills — Portable agent skills (self-contained procedures)
- awm — Scoped agent memory (tenant:user:project boundaries)
- awgit — Semantic version control (edit-ops, leases)
- awgraph — Code graph for agents (AST, call graphs)
- awrelay — Agent messaging (findings, alerts, coordination)
- awmail — Email for agents (send and receive)
- And 29 more...
Each has an "adopt" sentence: the smallest useful thing you can do with it alone, without adopting anything else.
Curated sets of bricks that work together:
- agent-vm — The bare agent VM
- agent-senses — Perception (search, pages)
- shared-worktree — Many agents, one repo
- the-front-door — Identity, authority, record
- And 5 more...
Lessons learned in production, written down so they don't have to be re-derived:
- A rule nothing asserts is a suggestion
- Make it a check, not a ticket
- Watch your gate fail
- Mutate the test, not just the code
- Design for the silence
- A check that cannot run must not pass
- The symptom names the innocent
- A checker in the wrong place found nothing
- Detection without delivery is not detection
- A gate that floods gets switched off
- Open green; ratchet down
- Measure it again
- Written is not deployed
- You wrote it; that does not mean it ships
- Generate, never copy
- The defect lives in the union
- Fail closed, then prove the happy path
- Never trust the caller
The corpus is generated once from ecosystem.yaml and awknowledge/laws/, then committed as JSON data files under awkno/pages/. After install, the package needs no external files or network.
This means:
- No runtime generation (fast startup)
- No external dependencies beyond stdlib
- Reproducible across machines and time
- Auditable: every page is in the repo
- Pager support: Automatic pagination on TTY (via
$PAGERor system default) - TTY-aware formatting: ANSI bold headers only when connected to a terminal
- Multiple output modes:
--plain— No ANSI codes (safe for piping to other tools)--json— Structured output for scripting- Default — Man-page-style formatted text
- Fuzzy search: Type something close, get ranked results
- Command shortcuts:
awkno list— Show all topics grouped by categoryawkno law N— Show law by numberawkno -k TERM/awkno --apropos TERM— Search (likeman -k)
This package is built for public distribution, and the corpus is GENERATED from an internal registry -- so the generator strips, and the build then re-checks, every category of internal detail: infrastructure hostnames, absolute paths from the build machine, issue-tracker and quality-gate identifiers, and imports that only resolve inside a private monorepo.
The point of scanning the generated corpus rather than the generator is that a sanitiser is only as good as its last pattern. A page that slips through reads as ordinary prose, so nothing downstream would ever notice.
python awkno/generate.pyThe generator reads:
ecosystem.yaml— The brick and stack registryawknowledge/laws/*.md— The 18 laws
And writes JSON to awkno/pages/.
pip install -e .
pytest
# Or run the CLI directly
python -m awkno.cli awdkpip install build
python -m build
# Publish to PyPI
twine upload dist/*from awkno import AwknoRegistry
registry = AwknoRegistry()
page = registry.get("awdk")
print(page.render())
# Search
results = registry.search("agent memory")
for page, score in results[:5]:
print(f"{page.topic}: {page.synopsis}")
# List by category
bricks = registry.list_by_category("brick")
laws = registry.list_by_category("law")awkno has zero runtime dependencies (PyYAML is dev-only, for corpus generation).
[project]
dependencies = [
"awkno",
]Read a law, apply it, send a pull request. The package itself is small and well-documented.
Pages are generated from ecosystem.yaml and law files — edits to those files flow into awkno on the next generation.
Apache 2.0. See LICENSE.
- Ecosystem registry: https://github.com/Aitherium/ecosystem
- Laws and codex: https://github.com/Aitherium/awskills
- AitherWorld reference: https://aitherium.com
awkno — read the principles once, apply them everywhere.
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 | 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 (you are here) | 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.
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 | 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 (you are here) | 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 |