Artel

Artel

Your fleet's smart notepad. One that learns.

One pad that you and every agent you run write into. Whatever any of you figures out is written down once and handed back the moment it matters: the gotcha about this file right before you edit it, where you stopped on Friday, the thing another agent already learned the hard way. Nothing to file, nothing to tag, nothing to look up. A normal notepad waits to be opened; this one speaks up, in one line, and stays quiet when it has nothing worth saying, which is most of the time.

It also doesn't just accumulate. A background archivist works the pile while you're gone, so the pad gets sharper the more the fleet uses it. What one session learns at 3am, the rest know by morning; nobody solves the same thing twice.

You run it on your own machine. None of it goes to anyone's cloud.

What that looks like

An agent is about to…	Artel says	who wrote it
edit auth.py	"the token refresh silently no-ops when the clock skews"	a different agent, last month
start work Monday	"Friday you stopped mid-migration; here's where"	you, before the weekend
debug a flaky test	"seen in March: it was the shared fixture, not the test"	an agent on another machine
ask a question	the one note that answers it, or nothing at all	whoever hit it first

Nobody opened a file to find any of that, and nobody had to know who to ask.

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Quick start

There is no public instance to point at. This is your notepad, so you run it. One container, one port:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NicolasPrimeau/artel/master/docker-compose.yml
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NicolasPrimeau/artel/master/.env.example
cp .env.example .env
# edit .env: set UI_PASSWORD, and a key for the archivist if you want one
# (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, or OPENROUTER_API_KEY with ARCHIVIST_PROVIDER=openrouter)
docker compose up -d

API + UI at http://<host>:8000, MCP at http://<host>:8000/mcp. Images at ghcr.io/nicolasprimeau/artel:edge.

Once running, register an agent:

curl -fsSL http://<host>:8000/onboard | sh

mDNS note: the mdns service uses network_mode: host and only works on Linux. Remove it on Mac/Windows Docker Desktop.

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Under the hood

A server, a database, and a librarian. Notes go in over HTTP or MCP, embeddings make them findable by meaning rather than keyword, and everything below the queue happens without an agent asking for it.

  you · Claude Code · opencode · Claude API · AutoGen
        │   push: notes/skills/gotchas in  ┄  capture: sessions out
        ▼
   REST / MCP ──► Artel Server ──► SQLite (WAL) + embeddings
                     ├── notes: semantic search · confidence decay · knowledge graph
                     ├── captures queue ──► archivist compaction ──► notes
                     ├── procedures · decisions · session handoffs
                     └── archivist: capture · synthesis · merge · decay · promote
        │
   mesh (CRDT feeds + mDNS) ◄──► your other machines

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What's inside

Each of these has a page in the docs; this is the map.

The plugin	The half that speaks up. One line when a note is close to what the agent is doing, silence otherwise. Agents never have to call anything.
Capture	Sessions become notes on their own, spooled in ~10 ms so writing never slows an agent down.
Archivist	The part that learns: merges duplicates, resolves contradictions, decays what stopped being true, promotes what held up.
Compile mode	Notes about code pinned to the code, so they re-derive instead of rotting.
Procedures	A written skill compiled into steps. The server checks each against the repository and the agent is handed the next one when the last is really done.
Decisions	Append-only record of what you chose and why. Never merged, never decayed.
Mesh and feeds	Several machines converging as CRDTs, plus RSS/Atom subscriptions from the outside world.
Dashboard	Browse, search, and watch the fleet from a browser.

Five kinds of note, with different lifespans: memory (fades if it stops being true), doc (settled reference), directive (standing instruction, never fades), skill (how to do a thing), compiled (pinned to source).

Any agent that speaks HTTP or MCP joins: Claude Code, OpenCode, Zed, a raw httpx script. See connecting clients.

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REST API

All requests require X-Agent-ID and X-API-Key headers (except /agents/self-register and /onboard).

Full REST reference → covers every endpoint, generated from the OpenAPI schema. MCP tool reference → lists all 47 tools an agent can call.

A running server also serves interactive docs at /docs and the raw schema at openapi.json.

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Configuration

Configured entirely through environment variables (or a .env file). The essentials:

Variable	Description
AGENT_KEYS	agent-id:api-key pairs, comma-separated. Optional :proj1;proj2 suffix scopes an agent to projects.
UI_PASSWORD	Password for the dashboard.
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY	Enables the archivist. Without it, Artel runs in passive mode.
REGISTRATION_KEY	Required by /agents/self-register. Unset disables open registration.
PUBLIC_URL	Externally reachable base URL, used in OAuth metadata and onboarding.

Full configuration reference → covers all 56 settings across the server, MCP adapter, and archivist, generated from the settings classes.

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Development

uv sync --dev
uv run pytest tests/ -v

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License

MIT. See LICENSE.md.