ollie/README.md

ollie

What happens if agent primitives are exposed as an ordinary filesystem? How much can be subtracted from AI agent implementations without reducing their usefulness? These are some of the motivating questions behind ollie.

• The core system provides a public library of AI agent primitives.
• The 9p filesystem server (Go) creates a virtual filesystem exposing the important state and behaviors as ordinary files and operations.
• A reference TUI implementation proves that it is possible to build a functioning and user-friendly terminal front-end using only the Go standard library.
• And, just because I like my Emacs friends, a reference Emacs interface front-end implementation.

Project Structure

• core/:
• tui/:
• 9p/:
• el/:

Getting Started

Clone with submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/lneely/ollie.git

Or after cloning:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Building

Build everything from the monorepo root:

mk

Or build specific components:

mk core    # Build core library
mk tui     # Build terminal UI
mk 9p      # Build 9p filesystem server

For Emacs Lisp, copy el/ollie.el into your own Emacs configuration directory, and:

(require 'ollie)

Configuration

Environment: ~/.config/ollie/env

OLLIE_BACKEND=openai           # ollama | openai | openrouter | anthropic | copilot | kiro (default: ollama)
OLLIE_OLLAMA_URL=              # base URL for Ollama (default: http://localhost:11434)
OLLIE_OPENAI_URL=https://openrouter.ai/api
OLLIE_OPENAI_KEY=sk-or-...
OLLIE_ANTHROPIC_KEY=sk-ant-...
OLLIE_COPILOT_TOKEN=...
OLLIE_KIRO_TOKEN=...           # bearer token or sqlite:// path (auto-detected from Kiro CLI if unset)
OLLIE_MODEL=qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b
OLLIE_TOOLS_PATH=~/.config/ollie/tools    # directory for tool scripts ({tool} steps)
OLLIE_MEMORY_PATH=~/.config/ollie/memory  # directory for memory files (ollie/m)

Shell environment variables take precedence over the env file.

Development

Update all submodules to latest:

git submodule update --remote

Credits

Many sources of inspiration:

• Plan 9 from Bell Labs — for an interesting system
• @9fans — for the Plan 9 port
• Suckless — for articulating good software development principles
• @simonfxr — for a solid agent baseline to "borrow" from, and other nifty ideas
• @aws — for a solid open-source agent implementation

License

GPLv3