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Masih Maafi
Masih Maafi

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Elpis: you choose what each agent sees

#ai #opensource #linux #devtools

Coding agents load every instruction file they find and keep the whole conversation until the context window fills. You cannot see what they were told, and you cannot take it back. Put several agents on one task and it gets worse: they write over each other's files, nobody checks the work, and you merge the result by hand.

I treated both problems as one, context management, and built Elpis around two rules.

You choose what each agent sees

The Context Ledger lists every instruction file, chosen file and memory with its token cost. You include or exclude each one. Smart Prune shortens a long tool result before the model reads it, and the original stays in an audit log.

Elpis in the terminal: the agent reads the project, a long search result is shortened before the model sees it, and the reply arrives with 87% of the context left

Each agent owns what it writes

The idea comes from Rust: one owner per value, many readers or one writer, never both. In an Elpis workflow every agent owns its own folder. In a Git project it works in its own worktree, and a step that changed files outside its folders fails. Every writer is followed by a check that reads its work, and the Mother agent reviews the combined result before anything reaches your project.

You describe a job. The Mother agent either does it herself or designs a team on a board that you can see and edit. The patterns are Sequential, Parallel, Kahn graph waves, Recursive (with a round limit) and Voting, and each agent may use a different model.

Workflows: the Mother agent designs a code-review team of eight agents in four waves, runs it and checks each agent's work

What you get

Elpis is a harness for Linux, built on OpenAI's Codex CLI. A terminal app and a desktop app share one engine and one state folder. You can chat with GPT, Claude and Gemini models through a ChatGPT or Claude subscription or an API key, and switch models without losing the thread.

Try it 

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MasihMoafi/Elpis/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Then run elpis for the terminal app or elpis-app for the desktop app. The v0.5.1 release also has Debian packages, an AppImage and an Arch/Omarchy package recipe, each with a SHA-256 checksum.

Limits

Elpis runs on Linux x86_64 only. Claude models run through your own Claude Code install. The ownership rules apply to workflows inside Elpis; they do not guard the rest of your machine.

I would like to hear where the Ledger or the ownership rules get in your way. The source and the issue tracker are at github.com/MasihMoafi/Elpis.

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