ollie

Ollie starts from a simple, slightly silly question: What might an AI agent look like in Plan 9? From there follow two more: What happens if agent primitives are exposed as an ordinary filesystem? and How much can we subtract from agent implementations while still being useful? The result is not a conventional "agent framework" but a small Go runtime and 9P‑backed filesystem surface that defines what an agent is, then exposes its state and behaviors as regular files and I/O streams, so that the surrounding environment (shell scripts, TUIs, web apps, cron, containers, and other OS facilities) can handle orchestration, scheduling, workflows, and interfaces instead. Features like conductor agents, complex workflow engines, or fancy editors are optional layers you build yourself by composing ordinary file reads, writes, and processes: a tiny s/sh CLI, an optimize | s/bfg pipeline, or a Claude‑Code‑style UI talking to the same filesystem namespace.

Getting Started

Clone with submodules:

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

Or after cloning:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Build and install everything from the monorepo root:

mk

Or build specific components:

mk core    # Build core library
mk 9p      # Build 9p filesystem server
mk httpgw  # Build HTTP gateway
mk webui   # Build web UI (requires Node.js + npm)

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

(require 'ellie)

See doc/USAGE.md for usage instructions.

Configuration

Environment: ~/.config/ollie/env

OLLIE_BACKEND=openai           # ollama | openai | 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)
OLLIE_ELEVATE_SOCKET=${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR}/ollie/elevate.sock  # socket path for x/elevate adapter (default: $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/ollie/elevate.sock)

Shell environment variables take precedence over the env file.

Remote Access

Two approaches: mount the 9P namespace directly with 9pfuse, or reach it over HTTP via ollie-httpgw.

9P mount

Because olliesrv speaks 9P over TCP, a remote instance can be mounted into the local namespace using 9pfuse. Agent sessions, tools, and all other filesystem state on a remote host become ordinary local files — no special client needed.

# On the remote host:
olliesrv start -tcp :9564

# Locally:
olliesrv mount remotehost:9564 ~/mnt/remotehost
ls ~/mnt/remotehost      # s/, t/, ...

Sessions created under ~/mnt/remotehost/s/ run on the remote host, so tool calls execute close to the remote filesystem rather than over the wire.

HTTP gateway

ollie-httpgw translates HTTP to 9P, letting any HTTP client interact with olliesrv without a 9P library. It's also the backend for the web UI.

# Connect to local server:
ollie-httpgw

# Connect to remote server:
ollie-httpgw -net tcp -addr remotehost:9564

See doc/USAGE.md for full details on the gateway and web UI.

Container

A Containerfile is included for running a self-contained remote server:

podman build --network=host -t olliesrv .
podman run --network=host -e ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=$ANTHROPIC_API_KEY olliesrv

Then mount locally or point httpgw at it:

olliesrv mount localhost:9564 ~/mnt/container-ollie
# or
ollie-httpgw -net tcp -addr localhost:9564

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