mariagorskikh/open-instinct

Open‑Instinct – an open‑source personal AI agent you can text

What it is

• A self‑hosted “personal agent” that you interact with by sending a text (iMessage, SMS or email). The agent lives inside its own lightweight virtual machine (a microVM on the Maritime platform) and can run real‑world actions on your behalf – e.g. create files, book calendar events, or make purchases.

How it works

1. Identity & messaging – You give the agent a phone number. Inkbox (a service that maps phone numbers/emails to an agent‑to‑agent endpoint) hands the number, an email address and a secure endpoint to the other party’s agent.
2. Execution environment – A small gateway wakes the agent, which runs inside a microVM on Maritime. Inside the VM runs the Pi agent loop (the core orchestration engine).
3. Tools & integrations – The Pi loop talks to external services through:
   • Composio – a unified API for SaaS tools (Notion, Google Calendar, etc.).
   • Stripe Link – a wallet that creates single‑use cards for purchases, so the model never sees your card details.
   • Claude Fable 5.1 – the default LLM that powers the reasoning.
4. Policy & trust – Before any tool is used, a policy guard checks the trust tier of the requesting agent (owner, partner, friend, stranger, …). Permissions are expressed in plain English (e.g., “Sam can book us dinner this week”).
5. Outputs – The agent can generate real artefacts (PDFs, files) in its workspace and send them back as attachments.

Key components (the repo layout)

Package	Role
core	Pi loop, memory, scheduler, policy engine
inkbox	Messaging adapters (iMessage, SMS, email) and agent‑to‑agent transport
computer	The desktop environment inside the microVM (Maritime desktopd)
apps	Router that forwards requests to Composio‑supported tools
network	Contact management, tier definitions, invitations
payments	Stripe Link integration for one‑time card payments
server	HTTP API (/health, /chat, /schedules)
gateway	Multi‑user signup/relay service for provisioning many agents
cli	Command‑line interface (instinct)
skills	Playbooks that define agent behaviours

Getting started

• Requires Node 22.19+ and pnpm 10.
• After cloning, install, set your Anthropic API key, and run pnpm instinct init with your name, phone, email and handle.
• pnpm instinct dev starts the local agent; you can then chat with it via the CLI or, after configuring Inkbox, via a real phone number.
• For production you can deploy the pre‑built Docker image to Maritime (pnpm instinct deploy). A gateway service can provision agents for many users.

Trust model & payments

• Six trust tiers (owner → stranger) are enforced in code before any tool runs.
• Purchases are mediated by Stripe Link: the agent requests a single‑use card, you approve it on your phone, the card is discarded after the transaction.

Status

• Version 0.1, with a test suite (837 tests) and end‑to‑end smoke tests.
• Real iMessage and Maritime deployments have been tried, but the project is still considered beta.

Who might use this?

• Developers or power users who want a private, self‑hosted AI assistant that can act on their behalf without handing over credentials to a third‑party service.
• Teams building custom “agent‑to‑agent” workflows where trust levels and auditability are important.

License – MIT.