Faculties

An office suite for AI agents.

Faculties are small, self-contained CLI tools that give an agent a stable workspace: a kanban board, a personal wiki, a file organizer, a situation-awareness dashboard, direct messaging, and more. They persist their state in a TribleSpace pile — typically ./self.pile — so the agent owns its own history across sessions.

Getting started

Precompiled binaries (sandboxes, restricted envs)

Each tagged release attaches per-target tarballs containing every faculty CLI (and the GUI viewer where it cross-compiles cleanly):

# pick the asset matching your platform — see github.com/erlkonig-ai/faculties/releases
curl -L https://github.com/erlkonig-ai/faculties/releases/latest/download/faculties-<TAG>-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz \
  | tar -xz
export PATH="$PWD/faculties-<TAG>-aarch64-apple-darwin:$PATH"

From source (dev environments)

Install a Rust toolchain (if you don't have one):

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Faculties is developed with TribleSpace, Mary, Soma, and a small CubeCL fork as one source cohort. Clone them as siblings, then install every faculty CLI (and the GUI viewer) onto $PATH:

mkdir faculties-source && cd faculties-source
git clone https://github.com/erlkonig-ai/faculties
git clone https://github.com/triblespace/triblespace-rs
git clone https://github.com/erlkonig-ai/mary
git clone https://github.com/erlkonig-ai/soma
git clone --branch zero-copy-seam https://github.com/erlkonig-ai/cubecl cubecl-fork
git -C triblespace-rs checkout 7ddf1cc55fed21f3341c2885884a2399486ac533
git -C mary checkout 38c911cae75d1659219909d99fd0e8d35ada78eb
git -C soma checkout ebbb149a3ae1c21b77b40aedfcd7a3d3ae09cd90
git -C cubecl-fork checkout 75635270eed8cfacd1cd0f171f2f6b45a5e65b9c
cd faculties
cargo build --release --workspace --bins --locked
scripts/install-release-cohort target/release
cargo install --path ../triblespace-rs/trible --locked

The cohort installer publishes one immutable generation through ~/.local/bin; put that directory before ~/.cargo/bin on PATH. Do not also run cargo install --path . --bins: that creates a second unmanaged Faculties suite in ~/.cargo/bin, where an older parser can shadow the active cohort and misread newer pile records. The installer refuses activation when an earlier PATH entry already provides one of its command names.

Use it

Create an empty pile and add a few things:

trible pile create ./self.pile
trible pile signing-key init ./self.pile
export PILE=./self.pile

compass add "ship the demo" --status doing
wiki create "Hello" "First *typst* fragment."
viewer               # picks up PILE from the environment

For agent onboarding: the portable bootstrap

If you're an AI agent landing in this repo for the first time — or setting one up — the bootstrap binary carries a curated onboarding seed: 21 Wiki entries, fully cross-linked into a guided tour (a start-here hub plus a "Next stop" spine), in four layers:

1. Foundations (7) — faculty model and authoring, wiki authoring, compass workflow, the work-as-its-own-ledger principle, tool selection lookup, and the getting-started hub.
2. Specific faculties (6) — files, teams, message, orient, relations, web — one fragment each, used when you reach for that faculty in practice.
3. Recipes and coordination (4) — chained-faculty workflows: research (compass → web → files → wiki), multi-agent coordination (relations + message + orient + compass), harness hooks, and collection-policy grants plus pile net synchronization.
4. Substrate concepts (4) — what a trible is, the pile, monotonic merge, and the architecture (why no faculty contains sync code) — Substrate 1/4 through 4/4.

Plus 7 #bootstrap-tagged compass goals walking through hands-on faculty use (mint an id, create a fragment, archive a file, run lint/check, mark a goal done with an outcome note).

Import it into the recipient's already initialized pile:

trible pile create ./self.pile
trible pile signing-key init ./self.pile
export PILE=./self.pile
bootstrap import

# Verify:
wiki list --tag bootstrap          # 21 fragments
compass list                       # 7 hands-on goals in TODO

The logical seed is built deterministically from the checked-in bootstrap/*.typ sources. Bootstrap signs the Wiki and Compass content COMMITs directly with the recipient's durable key into deterministic collections whose READ and WRITE policies are rooted at that key. No release-builder signature, authority census, branch identity, or seed private key is transplanted. Re-running bootstrap import with the same key is exactly idempotent.

For each of the 21 Wiki entries, a later bootstrap generation advances only the recognizable imported source strand. Recipient edits are never silently superseded: they remain visible as frontier forks for explicit reconciliation.

Then start with wiki show <id> on the "Getting Started: Your First Hour" fragment (tagged start-here) — that's the orientation tour that points at every other piece.

The bootstrap is ordinary source: edit bootstrap/*.typ and the declarative manifest in src/bootstrap.rs, then run bootstrap/build.sh. The verifier imports into a throwaway recipient, checks exact replay, and validates the Wiki and Compass projections.

Why

LLM agents forget. They lose their place, repeat themselves, and can't reliably reference what they did yesterday. Faculties give them somewhere to put things — and, because the state lives in a content-addressed pile, they give agents a history they can actually trust and share.

The design principle: work is its own ledger. Provenance and versioning should be a side effect of using the tool, not a separate obligation. When you move a goal to doing, you're not filing a status report — you're telling the tool what to show you next, and the history falls out naturally.

The faculties

Faculty	Purpose
compass	Goal/status/priority board plus referenceable ledger notes
wiki	Personal wiki with typst fragments, links, full-text search, and a classified frontier link audit (wiki links)
files	File organizer backed by blob storage and tags
orient	Situation awareness and directed message/goal/note notifications
atlas	Cross-collection map of the pile's contents
gauge	Metrics and counters
memory	Long-term memory: compact history and salient fragments
headspace	Model/prompt configuration
reason	Record reasoning steps alongside actions
patience	Soft timers and pacing
message	Direct messaging between personas and humans
relations	People, affinity, contact info
teams	Microsoft Teams archive and bridge
triage	Workflow staging for inbound items
archive	Import external archives (chats, exports) into the pile
web	Web search and fetch with results recorded

Each faculty's command surface lives under src/bin/, while shared schemas, collection semantics, validators, and reusable capabilities live in the library.

Notes on piles & collections

Every faculty reads PILE from the environment (via clap's native env-var support). You can pass --pile <path> to override it for a single call. Create a pile explicitly with trible pile create new.pile, then initialize its durable signing key once with trible pile signing-key init new.pile. Faculties publish independent signed COMMITs into self-describing collections. A descriptor fixes the collection's name, member encoding, and independent READ and WRITE admission policies; its content handle is the collection identity. A snapshot admits exactly the COMMITs whose signers satisfy that descriptor's WRITE policy using resident capability-proof evidence. There is no ambient team, owner namespace, mutable head, or CAS update, so independently extended pile copies converge by concatenation, all backed by the same content-addressed blob store. Historical branches are consulted only by explicit migration commands.

By default, a named faculty collection is rooted at the pile's durable signer. An operator can instead select an already-resident exact descriptor for one name with TRIBLESPACE_COLLECTION_<NAME> (64 hexadecimal digits, optionally prefixed by blake3:). Hyphens become underscores, so examples are TRIBLESPACE_COLLECTION_WIKI and TRIBLESPACE_COLLECTION_MEMORY_JOURNAL. Each name has its own variable because one binary may read several collections. The override changes only the descriptor it opens: TRIBLESPACE_KEY remains the local COMMIT signer, and the descriptor's resident policy and proof evidence decide admission. A missing, malformed, wrongly typed, wrongly named, or non-writable exact descriptor is an error before publication; Faculties never silently invents a signer-private replacement or appends an inert COMMIT.

GORBIE viewer

The installed viewer binary composes the full faculty dashboard — activity, wiki, compass, messages, relations, archives, and the other available panels — against a single pile. See the screenshot above.

From a checkout:

cargo run --release --bin viewer -- ./self.pile

Standalone per-widget demos (showing how to embed a single widget in your own GORBIE notebook) are in examples/: compass_board.rs, wiki_viewer.rs, messages_panel.rs, branch_timeline.rs, and pile_inspector.rs (a compact multi-widget composition example).

Contributing

Faculties are deliberately small at the command boundary. If you find yourself adding abstraction layers, stop and ask whether the feature belongs in the faculty at all or whether it would be better as a separate tool. Keep each src/bin/<name>.rs a legible CLI over the shared semantic library rather than duplicating storage or validation logic inside binaries.

License

Dual-licensed under either MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.