Superself

The open Company State Runtime.

Models have context. Agents have runtimes. Companies need state.

Company State is the durable, versioned truth of what an organization intends, has decided, is doing, may authorize, and can prove. A Company State Runtime turns that state into context, ready work, evidence-gated completion, and the next company state. Engine-enforced policy today covers the raw state verbs and the completion gate; supervised execution through WorkSpec contracts and cap-gated preset verbs are stated targets — docs/roadmap.md draws that boundary.

[!IMPORTANT] Superself is an early alpha. The local self CLI and the foundations described under What works today? work now. The complete Company State Runtime loop is the direction of the project, not a capability this release claims to have finished. Expect breaking changes while the event schema and verbs settle.

What is Superself?

Superself is building the open-source Company State Runtime: durable state beyond any one context window today, and governed execution beyond any one person's attention span as the target. People set direction, make consequential decisions, and remain accountable. Agents carry most planning, routine execution, recovery, verification, and reporting.

It exists to keep one kind of context in sync between humans and agents, from a single project up to a whole company: why each decision was made and whether it still holds, why each piece of work exists, what it contributes to, how far it is, and what blocks it. It is deliberately model-neutral and session-neutral — any agent, any tool, any session reads and writes the same state — because agent-native companies will not be built on one vendor's memory.

What ships today is the self CLI: a local-first vertical slice that requires no Superself account and keeps the primary workspace on your machine. Git versions your code; Superself versions the project itself — goals, decisions, work units, reports, and evidence — as typed events in an append-only log, with the context an agent needs derived from that log on demand.

Why do my agents start every session from zero?

Long-running projects outlive every chat, context window, model, and human memory. Goals, decisions, rejected directions, progress, and evidence become scattered across sessions and tools. Each new agent spends time reconstructing the project, misses constraints, or repeats a decision that was already made.

Hand-maintained instruction files and handoff notes help briefly, then grow stale or too large to use. A project needs canonical state that survives its sessions, plus a way to compile only the relevant part of that state for the next action. This is the continuity ceiling, and it is the first ceiling Superself targets.

Why doesn't adding more agents scale the work?

Agent execution does not scale when a person must decompose every request, choose every next task, watch every process, approve every step, recover every failure, and verify every completion. The human becomes the scheduler, message bus, and retry loop for the system. This is the supervision ceiling.

The goal is not to remove human control. It is to spend human attention where judgment and accountability matter, while the system handles routine planning, execution, coordination, recovery, verification, and reporting inside explicit boundaries.

The two ceilings reinforce each other: execution cannot be delegated safely without durable context, and durable context has limited value if a person still has to drive every action.

Do I need Superself, or is CLAUDE.md enough?

Instruction files like CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md are the right place for stable operating rules, and Superself writes into them rather than replacing them: self connect renders a managed block that teaches any terminal agent the protocol and the project's current conventions.

What an instruction file cannot hold is the state that changes with every session: which decisions are current and why, which work is open and who holds it, what evidence closed a unit, what was tried and rejected. A hand-edited file holding that goes stale the day after it is written, and it has no history, no evidence, and no way to bound what the next session reads. Superself keeps that moving state in an append-only event log, derives self context from it on demand, and leaves the instruction file to do what it is good at.

How is this different from an issue tracker like Linear or Jira?

An issue tracker coordinates people: tickets, statuses, and comments, read and updated in a web app. Superself records the state an agent needs to act: decisions with their rationale and lineage, conventions that govern how work is done, goals and objectives, milestones with exit criteria, and work units whose "done" is refused until the claim carries evidence — a commit, an artifact, or a report of what verifiably happened.

It is also placed differently: local-first, git-backed, and CLI-shaped, so the same tool the agent already runs in is the read and write surface, and context is compiled for the next action instead of browsed. Superself does not replace code review or CI — a branch reaches main through a pull request, and merge control deliberately stays with PR review and CI.

Do I need a vector database or a memory service?

No. Keeping a company's working context has been attempted with wikis, Notion, Obsidian, and a wave of agent-memory products, and the recurring failure is not retrieval power — it is that the record of intent decays and nothing enforces its truthfulness. That does not take complex technology to fix. It takes durable, asserted records with rules on the write path.

Superself's state is plain text: typed events in an append-only JSONL log inside a git repository your machine owns, folded into markdown any tool can read. It is grep-able, diff-able, blame-able, and portable; self search answers from the live records with no index server, and nothing about it is locked to a model, a vendor, or this decade.

How do I start?

Requires Node.js 22.12 or newer.

npm install -g superself

Initialize the directory that should hold the machine's workspace state, then register an existing project:

mkdir -p ~/self-workspace
cd ~/self-workspace
self init

cd ~/path/to/my-project
self project init
self goal add "Ship the first trustworthy release"
self decide "Keep customer data local" --why "This project handles private data"
self work add "The payment flow passes its end-to-end proof"
self context

Follow the getting started guide for the full setup path, including the separate state repository, managed agent blocks, private Git synchronization, and restoration on another machine. Follow the long-running project guide to carry a real outcome across sessions and agents through milestones, reports, and evidence-backed completion.

Run self --help for the full command surface. The main families are:

project state: goal, decide, convention, objective, milestone;
the entity grammar underneath them: state, alias;
work and evidence: work, report, artifact;
the process ledger: work started, work exited;
context and inspection: context, status, search, view;
workspace ownership: project, workspace, remote, sync, clone.

What does an agent get at session start?

self context prints the derived context an agent needs: the goal, active decisions and conventions, open work, and recent reports — generated from state, never hand-maintained. self work show <id> recovers the complete state of one unit and --history pages over its own events; self search <query> pulls the live records context left out, across every registered project. Managed blocks in AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md teach terminal agents to load and maintain that state, and the block refreshes on every fold.

Read Company State and context for the exact relationship between append-only event history, folded current state, generated views, agent context, recovery, and machine-local runtime data.

Why was this decided — and does it still hold?

The most expensive sentence in a long project is "wait, why did we do it that way?" — asked again by every new session, model, and teammate, and answered from fading memory. Superself makes a decision a first-class record: self decide carries the decision and its --why, --proposed marks what no person has confirmed yet, and a correction restates the record with its lineage instead of editing history. The next agent reads which decisions are current and why they were made — and stops re-litigating the ones that already closed.

What is this work contributing to, and what is it blocked on?

A task list answers "what is there to do." It does not answer what a unit of work contributes to, how far it actually is, or why it is stuck — the questions a person or agent picking it up needs first. In Superself a work unit links to the objective or milestone it serves, its reports attach the commit they describe as evidence, self work block records what it waits on — a decision, a dependency, or something external — and the process ledger shows whether an agent process is still running it or died without reporting. Pickup starts from the unit's own record, not from a previous session's transcript.

How does "done" stay honest?

Transcript text is not canonical state, an agent saying "done" is not proof, and autonomy is not permission to act without boundaries.

self work done refuses a bare claim: the outcome closes only when a report carries a commit or an artifact, or the done itself states what verifiably happened. Declared criteria gate the claim until each is covered by evidence. Reports attach the project's HEAD commit automatically, attached artifacts are digest-checked against what was ingested, and a work unit's outcome is immutable once recorded — a correction restates it with its lineage rather than editing history.

How does a company-level goal show its progress?

Progress is judged by outcomes, not motion. A goal breaks into time-boxed objectives; objectives carry milestones whose exit criteria must each be covered by evidence before the milestone counts as reached; work units link to what they serve, so within each project the chain from a goal down to the commit that moved it is readable in both directions. A workspace-scoped record renders in every project's context, which is how direction set once reaches every project and agent that must follow it.

How does context stay small as the project grows?

State accumulates for the life of a company; a context window does not. Every record therefore carries a placement — scope, priority, and exposure — that decides whether it renders as full text, one index line, or only a search pointer, and retention caps bound the always-rendered set in context tokens. Growth demotes detail toward self search instead of burying the context an agent reads, demotions record why, and an agent proposing one waits for a person to confirm. A mature project is built to resume without an oversized dump of its own history — making that selection reliable at every scope is the roadmap's Phase 2 exit. (The raw state verbs enforce the caps today; the preset verbs are not cap-gated yet.)

Does it force a methodology?

No. Underneath every verb is one record kind — an entity with text, free labels, typed links, and a placement — and the preset verbs (goal add, decide, work add, and the rest) are rows in a user-editable alias table. self alias add <verb> makes a first-class verb of any label your company actually uses; self state records anything the presets do not name. Your vocabulary, cadence, and process stay yours — Superself versions the state, not the methodology.

What works today?

Durable state. Goals, decisions, conventions, objectives, milestones, and work fold into one placed entity record, as typed events in an append-only log; every event refolds canonical views and lands as one commit in the workspace's own git history.
Cross-session pickup. self context, self work show, and self search give agents a generated view of current state and a pull path into full history; managed blocks in AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md teach terminal agents to load and maintain it.
Outcome links and evidence. Work contributes to objectives and milestones; done is a judgment whose claim must carry evidence, and declared criteria gate it until each is covered.
The process ledger. A work unit maps to the agent process running it, with liveness judged at read time; merge control deliberately stays with GitHub PR review and CI.
Inspectable views and sync. self view renders read-only HTML pages of the workspace, each project, work, decisions, events, and artifacts; explicit git-backed sync carries the store between machines.

The command-level inventory states each of these as verifiable claims against the current CLI.

What is not finished yet?

Project context is not yet reliably bounded and selected by workspace, project, work, attempt, domain, risk, and directive scope.
Natural-language intent does not yet compile through one stable public contract into objectives, work graphs, policies, and attempts.
Nothing schedules work across projects; dispatch is a person or a session starting agents, and the full loop across priorities, dependencies, budgets, capacity, failures, and completion is unproven.
The extension and MCP capability registry is still a design direction, not a general shipped plugin runtime.
The viewer is read-only today. It is not yet the conversational surface for directing, approving, interrupting, and observing company execution.
The complete path — one human outcome, autonomous planning and execution, recovery from failure, evidence-backed completion, and escalation only for consequential judgment — has not yet been proven as one stable product loop.

The command surface is broader than the finished product loop because the project is building and dogfooding its reliability primitives from the bottom up.

What loop is this building toward?

Superself is designed to turn one human direction into a durable, inspectable execution loop:

human intent
    ↓
durable directive, goal, and constraints
    ↓
scoped context and executable work
    ↓
policy, priority, dependency, capacity, and approval gates
    ↓
agent and MCP capability execution
    ↓
recovery, verification, and evidence
    ↓
canonical project state and an exception-focused report
    ↓
only consequential judgment returns to the human

The roadmap below is organized by operating outcome, not by release date. It states direction rather than a compatibility or delivery promise. The detailed current constraints, near-horizon capabilities, exit evidence, and issue mapping live in the living roadmap.

Phase 1 — Durable project state. Make goals, decisions, work, reports, artifacts, history, and evidence survive any session or tool. Keep state local-first, inspectable, and reconstructible. Status: the first usable CLI foundation is shipped and actively dogfooded.
Phase 2 — Bounded context at every scope. Compile stable workspace, project, work, and attempt contexts; select governing decisions, conventions, dependencies, and risk rules for the current action. Exit: a fresh agent resumes a mature project without a manual rebrief, an oversized context dump, or a contradiction of governing state.
Phase 3 — Governed autonomous execution. Compile bounded intent into executable work, schedule it across projects, supervise attempts, recover failures, verify outputs, and complete work whose evidence and authority gates are satisfied. Exit: one bounded human direction reaches evidence-backed completion without continuous human scheduling or terminal supervision.
Phase 4 — Composable company capabilities. Let trusted extensions contribute namespaced operations through one permissioned capability contract, including MCP adapters. Exit: a company adds domain capabilities without hard-coding them into Superself or bypassing its trust model.
Phase 5 — The Company State operating surface. Turn the viewer into the primary conversational surface for directives, approvals, interruption, and live activity. Exit: a person directs and understands a continuously operating agent organization from one surface while remaining responsible for the decisions that matter.

Who owns what — the person or the engine?

Superself's autonomy model is an allocation of responsibility.

Humans own:

goals, priorities, values, and organizational constraints;
irreversible, external, high-risk, or ambiguous decisions;
approval boundaries and the policies agents operate within;
accountability for what the company ultimately does.

The engine should own:

translating approved intent into bounded work;
routine scheduling, execution, coordination, retry, and recovery;
checking declared outputs, tests, evidence, and completion conditions;
maintaining canonical state and reporting material changes;
escalating when policy says human judgment is required.

Why an open core?

The state, policy, evidence, and execution boundary is where a company decides what agents may know and do. That layer must be inspectable, portable, and able to run locally without metering the number of agents, attempts, or connected capabilities.

An open core also gives capability builders one stable operating contract instead of requiring every tool to invent its own memory, approval, recovery, and evidence system.

FAQ

Where does my data live? On your machine. The workspace store is its own git repository, separate from your code, and nothing leaves it until you connect a remote of your choosing with self remote add and push with self sync. There is no account.

Which agents does it work with? Any terminal agent that reads AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md — the managed block teaches it the protocol — and anything that can run a CLI can read and write state directly.

What happens when two sessions write at once? Every event is one line in an append-only JSONL log, so concurrent appends — including from different machines — merge cleanly. A work unit another session holds is disclosed with who took it and when, never locked.

Is a chat transcript state? No. Only asserted records enter the log. Transcript text is not canonical state, and an agent saying "done" is not proof — the completion gate demands evidence.

Does Superself decide what merges to main? No. A branch reaches main through a GitHub pull request; merge control is deliberately owned by PR review and CI. Superself owns context and the work graph, not the merge gate.

What does it cost? The core is Apache-2.0 and runs entirely locally, with no metering of agents, attempts, or connected capabilities.

How do I develop and verify a checkout?

The repository pins Node 22.20 for contributors using nvm and uses pnpm 10.

git clone https://github.com/fxylabs/superself.git
cd superself
nvm use
pnpm install
pnpm typecheck
pnpm test
pnpm build
pnpm structure

Use the CLI and record reference when you need the current command families, record shapes, or the implementation-owned help boundary. If you are customizing the rendered viewer, use the viewer theming guide for the supported token and theme boundary.

Where does each file go?

apps/
└─ cli/                   the `self` CLI: state, context, work, and the process ledger

docs/
├─ concepts/              the state, context, authority, and evidence model
├─ guides/                task-oriented guides for using the current CLI
├─ examples/              end-to-end operating scenarios
├─ reference/             current CLI command and record reference
├─ viewer-theming.md      supported viewer tokens and accent themes
├─ maintainers/           branch, version, and release policy
├─ roadmap.md             current capability, next outcomes, and exit evidence
└─ strategy/              problem definition and positioning decisions

site/
├─ pages/index.html       the landing page, served at the site root
└─ public/                favicon and social card

ARCHITECTURE.md           layering, single gates, event namespaces, fixed naming
CONTRIBUTING.md           process and code conventions
spfn.site.yaml            opt-in and metadata for the site served from this repo

Read ARCHITECTURE.md before changing code and CONTRIBUTING.md before opening an issue or pull request.

How do I contribute?

Use the structured GitHub issue forms for reproducible bugs, concrete feature proposals, and maintenance work.
Do not open a pull request until a maintainer has accepted the related issue and assigned it to you.
Sign off every commit to certify the Developer Certificate of Origin.
Report vulnerabilities privately according to SECURITY.md.
Read the release policy before proposing version or tag changes.

Superself accepts implementation pull requests only after a maintainer accepts and assigns the related issue. Contributions are licensed under Apache-2.0 as described in CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

Superself is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

superself

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