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/:
• scripts/: shell scripts organized by hosted namespace (s/, b/, u/) and exposed via the ollie filesystem without $PATH changes

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.

Remote Access

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

Start a remote server

On the remote host (or in a container):

olliesrv start -tcp :9564

Mount the remote namespace locally

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

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.

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:

olliesrv mount localhost:9564 ~/mnt/container-ollie

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