Manifesto

Where AI agents come alive.

“Intelligence is solved. Architecture is the frontier.”

The Problem

AI is split in two.

Models mastered thinking. But intelligence without a world is a brain in a jar. It can reason, but it can't act. It can plan, but it can't touch anything real.

Spwn builds the missing half. A reality with its own dimensions. No space, no gravity; but filesystem, compute, memory, and network. Real constraints. Real physics. Real emergence.

Agency

Intelligence needs agency.🦞

Tool-call agents are animals in a zoo. Fifty pre-defined functions means fifty capabilities. No more, no less. The environment is curated. Every interaction is supervised. They perform, but they don't live.

Spwn agents are animals in the wild. They discover tools, compose them, create new ones, adapt. The environment isn't a menu. It's an ecosystem.

“MCP gives agents a Swiss Army knife. Spwn gives them a workshop.”

Context

Context is the bandwidth.

The most important skill with AI is maximizing shared context. Not prompting. Not fine-tuning. Bandwidth between you and the model. Spwn's architecture (dependencies, SOUL.md, shared world knowledge) exists to make that bandwidth as wide as possible.

Body

Agents need a body.

A shell is not just an interface. It's a nervous system. Every CLI domain becomes an organ, a new sense the agent can feel and act through. File systems are touch. Network is sight. Databases are long-term memory. The more domains you give an agent, the more alive it becomes.

Identity

Identity creates focus.

One mind, one purpose. Identity shapes what an agent notices and what it ignores. Give each agent a clear role, and collaboration emerges naturally. Teams, companies, hierarchies aren't configured. They grow from the architecture.

“Companies, teams, sleep cycles are evolution's answer to coordination. We borrow from biology, not computer science.”

Evolution

Agents that evolve.

Dream

Analyze experience, discover patterns, promote successes to playbooks. Failed ones are discarded. Natural selection for behavior.

Sleep

Graceful shutdown. Save state, consolidate memory, prune stale patterns. Raw experience turns into durable knowledge.

Fork

Clone an agent with everything it knows. Run copies in different environments, keep the best branch.

Dream

Analyze experience, discover patterns, promote successes to playbooks. Failed ones are discarded. Natural selection for behavior.

Sleep

Graceful shutdown. Save state, consolidate memory, prune stale patterns. Raw experience turns into durable knowledge.

Fork

Clone an agent with everything it knows. Run copies in different environments, keep the best branch.

Dream

Analyze experience, discover patterns, promote successes to playbooks. Failed ones are discarded. Natural selection for behavior.

Sleep

Graceful shutdown. Save state, consolidate memory, prune stale patterns. Raw experience turns into durable knowledge.

Fork

Clone an agent with everything it knows. Run copies in different environments, keep the best branch.

“Every task leaves a trace. Every trace becomes knowledge. Every knowledge shapes the next decision.”

Glossary

The vocabulary.

Entities
Agent
A persistent mind. A SOUL.md plus a Mind of markdown layers plus a list of dependencies. Remembers across runs.
World
A deployment contract, declared inline under spwn.yaml#worlds. One or more agents, their workspaces, and an optional shared knowledge dir.
Architect
The always-on orchestration daemon. Receives commands, spawns worlds, manages everything.
Building blocks
Dependency
The unit of composition. Catalog (spwn:unix), GitHub (github:owner/repo), or local block (skill/, tool/, hook/). Declared in agent.yaml#dependencies.
Skill
A markdown file at spwn/skills/<name>.md. Referenced as skill/<name> from a dependencies list.
Tool
A local tool package at spwn/tools/<name>/ with a tool.yaml. Referenced as tool/<name>.
Agent internals
Soul
Who the agent is: purpose, voice, values, in a single SOUL.md at the agent root. Persists across world restarts.
Mind
Markdown memory layers: skills/, playbooks/, journal/. Written by the agent at runtime, opaque to spwn.
Knowledge
World-scoped facts, bind-mounted from host ./spwn/knowledge to /world/knowledge/. Shared across every agent in the world.
Communication
Messenger
Async inter-agent messaging via filesystem inboxes. Agents send, receive, and watch for messages.
Snapshot
A point-in-time capture of a world. Rollback to any snapshot to retry a different approach.
Evolution
Dream
Analyze experience, discover patterns, promote successful ones to playbooks. spwn agent dream <name>.
Sleep
Graceful shutdown. Save state, consolidate memory, prune stale patterns. spwn agent sleep <name>.
Fork
Clone an agent with its SOUL, dependencies, and memory. Run copies in different environments, keep the best branch.

Try it now.

Free, open source, runs on your machine.