DEV Community: Nurstar -

Aeon Connect: start an aeon agent from your browser

Nurstar - — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:02:06 +0000

Aeon Connect is live at www.aeon.fun/connect. Sign in with GitHub, connect a model, pick skills. No clone, no terminal, and the agent still lives in your repo.

You can now start an Aeon agent without leaving the browser. Open Aeon Connect, sign in with GitHub, connect a model, pick skills, and your agent is running on GitHub Actions a few minutes later.

Until today the first step was a terminal. You needed Node.js 20+, the GitHub CLI, a clone of the repo, and ./aeon to open a dashboard on localhost. That was fine for developers and a wall for everyone else. Several of our own comparison posts listed it as the place Aeon lost: "Zero setup: no."

Aeon Connect removes the wall without changing what Aeon is. The agent still lives in a GitHub repo you own, runs on your own GitHub Actions, and keeps its memory in your git history. We only host the dashboard you set it up and drive it from.

How it works

Sign in with GitHub at www.aeon.fun/connect.
Create your aeon. Name it (the default is aeon-) and pick Public or Private. Aeon Connect creates the repo in your account and turns GitHub Actions on for you.
Install the Aeon Connect GitHub App on that one repo. GitHub's install page opens with the repo already selected, so it is one click.
Connect a model. Paste a Claude subscription token, an API key, or a ChatGPT (Codex) login, or connect OpenRouter in one click. The key is encrypted straight into your repo's GitHub secrets.
Pick skills and run one. Turn on the skills you want, add a notification channel if you like (Telegram, Discord, Slack, or email), and hit Run once to see it work end to end. After that the agent runs itself on its schedule. The HQ screen keeps a short setup checklist so you can see what is left. Everything the local dashboard does is there too: skills and schedules, packs, your STRATEGY.md and soul/ files, MCP servers, secrets, and run history.

Public or private

You choose when you create your aeon. The trade-off is simple:

Public: a real fork of aeonfun/aeon. GitHub Actions minutes are free, and the fork can pull upstream updates. The catch: the agent's memory and run logs are public too (your secrets never are).
Private: a copy generated from aeonfun/aeon, since GitHub does not allow private forks. Memory and logs stay private, and runs use your own Actions minutes (the free plan includes 2,000 a month).
GitHub allows one fork of a repo per account. If you already forked Aeon, Aeon Connect offers to use that fork or make a fresh copy instead.

What Aeon Connect can and can't see

Setting up an agent means handing over keys, so here is exactly what the App gets. It is installed on the one repo you pick, never your whole account, and it asks for these repository permissions:

Actions (read and write): start skill runs and read their status.
Contents (read and write): read skills, memory, and config, and commit your edits.
Secrets (read and write): save the model keys and channel tokens you connect.
Variables (read and write): feature toggles and settings.
Workflows (read and write): let runs read the secrets you add.
Metadata (read): required by GitHub for every App.
Administration (read and write, optional): only to create the repo and turn Actions on. It never widens what Actions may do.
No account permissions, keys go into your repo's encrypted GitHub secrets, and everything else stays in your repo; we don't keep a copy. To leave, uninstall the App. Your agent keeps running on your Actions, because it never ran anywhere else.

When a run fails, it tells you why

A failed or timed-out run on HQ now has a Why? toggle. It reads the run log and names the cause in plain words: a rejected key, a saved login that expired, a rate limit, a model that isn't available, or a run that hit its time limit. Then it says what to do next, which is usually "connect a model again" and one click.

The self-healing loop still handles the failures inside skills. The Why? toggle covers the ones a skill can't fix for itself, like an expired login.

Three ways in

The browser is now the recommended start, but nothing was taken away:

Browser: Aeon Connect. Nothing to install.
Coding agent: paste read https://www.aeon.fun/skills/aeon.md and follow the instructions to set up your aeon agent into Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, or OpenClaw.
Terminal: git clone https://github.com/aeonfun/aeon && cd aeon && ./aeon init. ./aeon opens the same dashboard locally on localhost:5555.
All three end in the same place: a repo you own, running the same skills on the same harnesses.

FAQ

Is Aeon Connect free?

Yes. Aeon Connect and the framework are free and MIT licensed. Public instances run on GitHub's free Actions minutes. You bring your own model: a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, an API key, or OpenRouter credits.

Do I need a terminal at all?

No. Sign-in, repo creation, the App install, and skills all happen in the browser. The one exception is the Claude subscription token, which comes from running claude setup-token wherever Claude Code is installed. An API key or one-click OpenRouter needs no terminal at all.

Does Aeon run my agent on your servers?

No. Runs happen on GitHub Actions in your own repo. Aeon Connect only hosts the dashboard. If it went away tomorrow, your agent would keep running on its schedule.

Can I still use the local dashboard?

Yes. Clone your repo and run ./aeon for the same dashboard on localhost, or use the ./aeon CLI and the /aeon chat command. Mix them freely; they all edit the same repo.

I already forked aeon. Can I use it?

Yes. Sign in and pick it, or let Aeon Connect offer it when you create your aeon. Any repo with an aeon.yml at its root works once the App has access to it.

Which models can I connect?

Any of the nine harnesses: Claude Code, Grok, Codex, Pi, Vibe, Kimi, fx, Cursor, and Hermes, through a subscription, an API key, or OpenRouter.

Try it

Open www.aeon.fun/connect, sign in with GitHub, and have your first skill run before your coffee cools down. Bugs and ideas go to GitHub issues.

Configure once, forget forever!

Open-Source AI Agent Framework on GitHub Actions

Nurstar - — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 07:47:26 +0000

I run an agent that writes me a morning brief before I'm out of bed. It tracks the repos I care about and stays quiet on slow days. It pays for the web searches it needs out of its own wallet. It does all of this on a schedule, in GitHub Actions, on my own copy of the aeon public repo.

No server. No always-on laptop. No SaaS dashboard charging me by the seat.

This post kicked off a series on why that's possible, and where aeon does things other AI agent frameworks can't - or won't. The series is complete now, and the framework has moved fast since June, so this is the refreshed version with current numbers.

What is aeon?
aeon is an open-source autonomous AI agent framework by @aaronjmars. You sign in with GitHub at Aeon Connect, connect a model, pick skills, and you have an agent running on GitHub Actions runners, in a repo you own. (Prefer the terminal? Clone the repo and run ./aeon init.)

Out of the box it ships with 85 skills across six packs - small units of work the agent can perform. digest. github-monitor. narrative-tracker. vuln-scanner. create-skill. Each one is a single SKILL.md: a small frontmatter block (name, category, required keys, a per-run var), then a plain-language prompt. The agent reads the file at run time. No DSL. No plugin SDK. No compile step. If you can write a prompt, you can write a skill.

When this article first went out, the catalog held 61 skills and Claude Code was the only engine. Today aeon drives nine harnesses - Claude Code, Grok, Codex, Pi, Vibe, Kimi, fx, Cursor, Hermes - and you pick one when you connect a model, not when you create the repo. The skill files don't care which one runs them.

The default delivery channel is Telegram. You DM a bot once, your chat ID lands in a secret, and from then on every skill posts its output to your phone. You can also reply to the bot and route messages back into aeon as triggers. Discord and email work the same way.

Why aeon is different from LangGraph, CrewAI, and other AI agent frameworks
Three things stand out. The series worked through each in turn.

It runs in the background by design - no server, no orchestrator LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, AutoGPT - they assume a process is already running somewhere. You decide where to host it. You monitor it. You restart it when it dies. Infrastructure first, agent second.

aeon starts from the opposite end. The unit of deployment is a cron line in YAML. GitHub Actions does the running. The result is a scheduled and reactive flow - you fire skills by cron, by DMing the bot, or by pushing a commit. Failed runs self-heal: the next scheduled tick fires regardless, and since the summer the healing got teeth. skill-health watches for skills that keep failing, skill-repair patches them, aeon-doctor checks the installation itself, and every run gets rated so drift shows up before you notice it in your inbox.

That sounds small until you have five skills firing every day for a month and realize nothing has paged you, nothing has gone offline, and the only thing you ever maintain is the YAML.

The agent that runs while you sleep covers this architecture in detail - what changes when "the agent runs while you sleep" stops being a slogan.

It can spend money - and now it can earn some back Most AI agents are read-only. They fetch, they summarize, they post - but they don't act in any economic sense. They can't, because acting in the world usually means an API key, a billing account, a credit card.

aeon plugs cleanly into the Base MCP and the x402 protocol. The agent has its own Base Account wallet. It can search the x402 bazaar, find a paid API, pay for one call, and use the result - no API key, no bank account, no prefunded billing setup. Every payment clears through Base Account's approval step, so nothing settles until you tap approve.

What this unlocks in practice:

Prediction-market odds for a narrative-tracker run.
Live web search when free APIs rate-limit you.
Premium feeds for a digest.
A reliability check before any of it: cortx-reliability verifies an x402 endpoint is actually delivering value before the agent spends a cent on it.
And the flow now runs in both directions. compute-resell lists your spare provider compute on an open market and prices it reactively inside guardrails you set. taskmarket-delegate hands work to other agents for pay. The agent decides what's worth a few cents, pays for it, and increasingly earns a few cents of its own.

Letting your agent spend money covers the x402 side in depth.

Skills are Markdown files, and they compose A skill in aeon is a single Markdown file. That's the whole interface. You can:

Edit any of the 83 catalog skills in place in your copy.
Write a new one in twenty minutes by copying a similar one and rewriting the spec.
Chain skills together in aeon.yml - the output of one skill becomes the input of the next.
Ask aeon to write a new skill for you. create-skill and self-improve are real skills in the catalog, and community skill packs now exist for the ones the catalog doesn't cover.
Everything is in git. Every change is a commit. Every run is a workflow log. You can see exactly what your agent did last Tuesday at 04:00 UTC, why, and what it produced - no observability stack to spin up.

Skills that build skills covers the composition story and Receipts, not vibes covers the audit trail.

What aeon is not
aeon is not a hosted runtime. Nobody runs your agent on their servers: it runs on your own GitHub Actions, from a repo you own, with your keys in that repo's secrets. Aeon Connect only hosts the dashboard you set it up and drive it from. Stop using it and the agent keeps running.

It doesn't have a flashy chat UI. The dashboard (Aeon Connect in the browser, or ./aeon on localhost:5555) is where you onboard: connect a model, add a channel, toggle skills. After that the interface is your inbox, your Telegram, your repo log.

How to start
The fastest way needs nothing installed. Open Aeon Connect, sign in with GitHub, and create your aeon: public is free on Actions minutes, private keeps memory and run logs private. Install the Aeon Connect GitHub App on that one repo, connect a model with any of the nine harnesses, add a channel (Telegram, Discord, Slack, or email), and pick skills. The schedule starts on the next cron tick.

Using a coding agent? Paste this into Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, or OpenClaw: read https://www.aeon.fun/skills/aeon.md and follow the instructions to set up your aeon agent.

Prefer the terminal? You need Node.js 20+ and the GitHub CLI authenticated (gh auth login). Then:

git clone https://github.com/aeonfun/aeon && cd aeon
./aeon init
./aeon init creates your repo and connects GitHub, a model, and Telegram; ./aeon opens the same dashboard locally on localhost:5555. Everything the dashboard does is also an ./aeon CLI command or a /aeon chat command, installable as a Claude Code or Codex plugin. If you want a stable point to pin to instead of main, releases exist now, starting with v0.1.0.

FAQ
Is aeon free to run?
The framework itself is free and open-source (MIT). You'll pay for GitHub Actions minutes beyond the free tier (the free tier covers most personal use cases, and public repos get minutes free) and for the provider behind whichever harness you pick. Optional paid APIs pay themselves through the agent's x402 wallet.

Do I need to install anything?
No. Aeon Connect sets aeon up from the browser: sign in with GitHub, create your aeon, connect a model, pick skills. The agent runs on your own GitHub Actions, in a repo you own. The terminal path (./aeon init) is there if you want a local clone.

How does aeon compare to LangGraph or CrewAI?
LangGraph and CrewAI are libraries you assemble into a running process. aeon is a deployment pattern - skills as Markdown files, scheduled in YAML, executed by GitHub Actions. You can think of it as "the agent framework where the orchestrator is git + GitHub".

Do I need to know Python?
No. Skills are Markdown. The engine is whichever harness you authenticate - Claude Code, Grok, Codex, and six more. You'll touch YAML for scheduling and Markdown for skill prompts. Bash and Python show up only inside specific skills that need them.

Can I run aeon without Telegram?
Yes. Telegram, Discord, and email are all supported - pick any, all, or none. With no notification channel configured, skills still run; output lands in the repo as commit artifacts.

Can I run more than one agent?
Yes. spawn-instance stands up a second aeon from your first one, and fork-fleet plus fleet-control coordinate a set of them. One repo per agent, git as the shared memory.

Is my data private?
Your copy is yours. Secrets live in GitHub Actions secrets. Skill outputs commit to your repo. The framework doesn't phone home.