awnix

Docs · Source · 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 one of its 55 bricks — each installs on its own, runs offline, and needs no account.

Start here: Boot one throwaway box and try to make a change you cannot reproduce.

A Linux you can hand to an agent.

Not a distro with an AI assistant bolted on. A bootable, immutable base built for machines where software writes software — and where you still need to know what happened, undo it, and prove it.

podman build -t awnix:latest -f Containerfile .

That's the whole install. The OS is a container image: you build it, you sign it, you roll it back.

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Why this exists

Give an agent real access to a machine and you inherit four problems on day one:

It will change things you can't see. Not maliciously — thoroughly. An immutable /usr and atomic updates mean every change is a new image you can diff, and a bad one is bootc rollback, not an evening.

It will run alongside other agents. Two processes editing the same file is not a merge conflict, it's lost work. That's why the tooling below has leases.

It will be wrong sometimes. The question isn't whether, it's whether you find out cheaply. Snapshots and verified artifacts make "what did it actually do" a command instead of an investigation.

It will need credentials, and shouldn't get yours. awnix ships no password at all — the account is locked, access is by SSH key, and there is nothing to leak because nothing was ever set.

If you're running agents on someone else's platform, all four are handled by trusting the platform. awnix is the other bet: you can verify everything, so you have to trust nothing.

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What you actually get

• podman, buildah, skopeo, crun — rootless containers, no daemon

• cloud-init — so a key-only image is genuinely reachable

• Cockpit on 9090 — a web console for a machine with no desktop

• firewalld with an awnix zone and zero ports opened

• an unprivileged awnix account, locked, with NOPASSWD sudo

• bootc — atomic updates, real rollback

• the eleven aw tools, preinstalled and importable (the table below)

No services. No agent. No account. What runs on top is yours.

The aw tools are not an exception to that line — they are tools, not services. Nothing runs, nothing listens, nothing has an account. awgit does not start a daemon; it refuses a commit when someone else holds the lease. The distinction that matters is does it run on its own, and none of these do.

They ship preinstalled because the alternative was worse: this README advertised all of them while the image contained none, so awgit answered command-not-found on a machine whose whole pitch is that tooling.

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Getting an agent onto it

awnix deliberately ships no agent, and that is the honest answer to "how do I run one": you layer it on. A base image that arrives with an agent already running has decided what you are doing with your machine.

The layer is small, because the capabilities are already here:

FROM awnix:latest
RUN pip3 install --no-cache-dir awdk         # the agent runtime
# ...your skills, packs and credentials

awdk finds the aw tools by import — they are already on the image — so the agent gets leases, the call graph, messaging, scoped memory, snapshots and verified artifacts without any wiring. That is the point of putting them in the base rather than in the agent: swap the agent, keep the guarantees.

What that buys you concretely, from the four problems at the top of this file:

you inherit	what stops it	already installed
it changes things you cannot see	atomic updates, bootc rollback	bootc
two agents editing one file	a lease refused at commit time	awgit
it will be wrong sometimes	a restore that fully lands or not at all	awrecover
you cannot prove what it produced	Ed25519 seals, verified fetch	awseal, awshare
it cannot see past its own training	a real browser and a search it can query	awbrowse, awfind
anyone who gets the link gets in	an invitation addressed to one person, revocable alone	awnboard
you cannot tell a person from a script	a verdict with evidence, where "cannot tell" is not "yes"	awnest

That last row is why the base is worth having at all. An agent with root on a box and no way to read a page is a very expensive offline function. awbrowse and awfind are clients, so the browsing engine and the search providers stay on a service you run: the agent gets to look things up without any of your queries leaving for a vendor you did not choose.

Run the agent as a service with the unit template in units/, or interactively while you are still deciding what it should do.

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The credential model, and why it's this one

The awnix account has no password. Access is by SSH key: cloud-init injects your launch keypair on a cloud image; on bare metal you place one.

Two details that look optional and are not:

cloud-init is what makes key-only work. Remove it and you have an image with no password and no key path — unreachable rather than insecure, which is worse than the shared credential it replaced. If you fork this and drop cloud-init, give yourself another way in first.

NOPASSWD sudo is the companion, not a convenience. A locked account cannot sudo at all if sudo demands a password. Key-only login without it gives you a machine you can reach and cannot administer. ec2-user and ubuntu work the same way, for the same reason.

Password authentication is off in sshd. With no password anywhere it's dead weight, and image scanners flag it — correctly.

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Running something

awnix ships unit templates, not units. A base image that hands you a fleet has already decided what you're running.

sed -e 's/{{ name }}/myapp/g' \
    -e 's|{{ image }}|ghcr.io/you/myapp:latest|g' \
    -e 's/{{ port }}/8080/g' \
    units/service.container.j2 > /etc/containers/systemd/myapp.container

systemctl daemon-reload && systemctl start myapp
firewall-cmd --zone=awnix --add-port=8080/tcp --permanent

The template carries four opinions, each one something that's expensive to learn the hard way:

state under /var	an immutable /usr loses anything else on update
a real healthcheck	without one, a wedged container looks exactly like a healthy one to every supervisor on the box
Restart=unless-stopped	nothing revives an exited container, and this still honours a manual stop
After=network-online.target	the difference between a network that's configured and one that merely exists

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Make it bootable

podman run --rm -it --privileged \
  -v /var/lib/containers/storage:/var/lib/containers/storage \
  -v "$PWD/output":/output \
  quay.io/centos-bootc/bootc-image-builder:latest \
  --type ami --local awnix:latest

--type also takes iso, qcow2, vmdk, raw.

Update it

sudo bootc upgrade   # stage
sudo reboot          # atomic switch
sudo bootc rollback  # if it went badly

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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 (you are here)	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	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 (you are here)	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	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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