Autolith

(tasks)

A live inventory of owned work with lineage, timing, usage, and artifacts. Read a child's transcript, send it a correction, or cancel it.

Engineering role

The bundled engineering role returns the artifact contract, and your own roles can extend it with extra required fields.

Semantic edits

lsp.semantic turns a language server's rename, code action, or file move into one retained proposal. Applying it checks every file's revision and rolls the whole set back if anything fails.

Structural rewrites

Optional ast-grep queries and rewrites, previewed first and published under the same stale-revision checks as every other edit.

Peer messages

Grant one agent a durable, one-way channel to another, even across sessions. Messages are coordination data and never carry extra authority.

Debugger

Optional Debug Adapter Protocol sessions: launch or attach, set breakpoints, step, and inspect variables, each behind exact approval.

Jobs wake the agent

Shell, Lisp, RLM, skill, and task work that outlives a ten-second grace period is handed off, not rerun. The finished job continues the turn with a bounded notice, and completions that land together share one turn.

Logs, not dumps

Every command keeps its full output behind a shell-log: reference. The model sees a 6,000-byte preview weighted toward the tail, where the errors are, and pages or greps the rest on demand.

Many steps, one call

lisp.eval runs a sequence of forms, and with host tools a Lisp program can call agent tools and branch on their results inside one evaluation. Executable skills turn repeated procedures into tested code.

One edit, many files

A language-server rename or code action arrives as one proposal instead of a file-by-file edit loop, and it lands atomically or not at all.

Compaction keeps the work

Unfinished tool calls, running jobs, and steering that arrives mid-summary carry across compaction. The complete history stays searchable through conversation: resources, so old details are fetched instead of carried.

Partial results are kept

When recursive inference reaches its budget it returns what it finished and a context to resume from, so work already paid for is not thrown away.

Advice only when relevant

Context rules attach guidance only for matching paths, languages, tools, or roles, as ephemeral notes that erode instead of riding along on every request.

Spend guards

Retries after streamed output are capped, exhausted subscription quotas fail at once, runaway repeated tool calls are stopped, and loaded tool definitions are replayed intact so the prompt cache keeps growing.

Sandbox

cl-exec-sandbox is our platform abstraction for sandboxing, which works on Linux, Mac and Windows.

The default policy is to give commands no network, a read-only host access, allow writing in the workspace and temp directories, forbid changing repo metadata, and a sixty seconds timeout.

On Linux it adds process, user, IPC, UTS, and network namespaces, no_new_privs, and seccomp.

Classification

In automatic mode one RLM inference frame judges each command under a two-call, eight-thousand-token budget and answers: sandboxed, full access, or denied.

Approvals

You can select different permission levels: approve once, run sandboxed, full access, or denied. Headless jobs deny anything that would otherwise open the picker, so make sure to select the correct default setting.

Credentials

In a number of places, Autolith will censor your credentials for MCPs, OAuth, tokens and similar.

Bounds

Most things have defined boundaries to prevent runaway doom loops and reckless spending. These things are of course configurable.

Revision gating

We use careful hashline-based editing (similar to Pi agent), which ensures the agent correctly selects places to edit and does not clobber over forgotten changes.

Immutable mode

--immutable prevents Autolith from self-modifying when you need maximum predictability and security.

You can use it when you are integrating Autolith into another program as a worker, or you just don't want self-modification.

Stores are either append-only or transactional. Shared-state storage places are serialized across processes, meaning that 2+ AL instances can work in the workspace at the same time.

Skills

We support standard SKILL.md with frontmatter, or native SKILL.sexp format, which can also load modifications into the AL image on load (so audit your skills before use).

Project skills take precedence over user's skills, if there's a conflict. Skills in the shared ~/.agents/skills directory are found too, and executable skills run tested Lisp workflows in a disposable worker.

MCP servers

Both stdio and streamable HTTP are supported, with a per-server approval policy. A project can have its own addition MCP servers defined and loaded if marked as trusted in directory-scopes.sexp.

Child roles

Seven predefined child roles are available: scout, designer, reviewer, librarian, task, engineering, sonic (GOTTA GO FAST). You can add your own to .autolith/agents/ and define tools, models, and efforts the role is assigned by default.

Providers

Ten providers are built in, including GitHub Copilot subscriptions, and other OpenAI-compatible providers are trivial to add.

init.lisp

Your entrypoint to scripts being loaded on launch to change any settings to your preferences, or modify Autolith in any way you like.

Request context

define-context-contributor attaches what we call ephemeral notes to provider requests. You can use this to give the model temporary additional context to steer it better. They will quickly erode in a way that does not bust your whole cache. Context rules attach notes only when a path, language, tool, or role matches.

Commands

define-application-command is a simple macro that lets you add your own commands that affect the harness the agent, or well, anything else in your system. The result will be a plain Common Lisp function with some metadata, so you can easily test it by hand and ask AL to help you debug it. Adding commands is cheap, you can litter them like small pebbles on the beach.

Instructions

AGENTS.md, no surprises here. Autolith can also create AUTOLITH.org, where it can track information that's specific to it and should not confuse other agents you might use.

Settings

Every knob is a typed, documented setting. (settings) opens a grouped page where you change values in place, and (setf (config :model) ...) does the same from Lisp.

Help

(help) gives a compact overview by topic, and (help "resource.edit") explains any command, operation, or tool from its live schema.