chief

Run a company of AI agents in your terminal.

Quick start · Commands · How it works · Examples · Contributing

chief creates and operates a persistent company of AI agents: a CEO, a recursive tree of departments, and stable people who each have a name, a job title, a mandate, and a private memory. You talk to them, and they talk to each other.

Quick start

You need macOS or Linux and tmux.

1. Install chief:

curl -fsSL https://chief.zipbox.ai/install.sh | sh

Every person in a company runs on Pi, the agent runtime; the installer installs it when it is missing, and asks before upgrading one that is older than the required version.

2. Found your first company in any empty directory:

mkdir acme && cd acme && chief

With no company in the directory, chief opens Founder. Founder asks for exactly two things, the company's name and its purpose, then creates the company and boots its CEO. Founder designs nothing; the CEO is what builds the organisation.

3. Talk to the CEO. Tell it what you want, for example "a three-person research desk that writes me a daily market brief", and it creates the departments, appoints the heads, and hires the people. Once the company exists, Founder never appears again: from then on, chief in that directory starts the company if it is stopped and attaches your terminal to the CEO.

Everyday commands

Command	What it does
chief	Found a company here, or start and attach the one that exists
chief ls	List every company on this machine and its state
chief attach	Put this terminal in this company's CEO, starting it if stopped
chief stop	Stop this company's runtime, then its daemon
chief stand-down [reason]	Stop everyone except the CEO; queued mail is held, not lost
chief resume	Let the company work again after a stand-down
chief reset [--yes]	Shed the company back to CEO-only, deleting nothing
chief rm [--yes]	Remove the company for good
chief upgrade [--check|--rollback]	Install the latest release over this one

The full command surface, the disk layout, and the runtime are in docs/OPERATING.md.

Why chief

Most tools orchestrate agents as a flat pool of workers. chief runs a real organisation, and everything durable in it is a row in the directory's own SQLite database. A company survives being closed, moved, and reopened, because the company is the database.

• A CEO and recursive departments, with named heads and specialists.
• One private Pi history, workspace, inbox, and memory directory per person.
• Messages and reminders that survive a restart.
• Durable assignments with acknowledgement, progress, escalation, and result delivery.
• Safe stop, restart, transfer, and removal that keep a person's history until you explicitly delete it.
• Parking: a quiet person costs no compute and loses nothing.

How it works

A company is a directory. Running chief in it starts one chiefd for that directory: a daemon that opens .chief/db/chief.db and decides who should be running. The chief client owns tmux and decides where they are shown: it asks the daemon over HTTP, compares the answer to the session it can actually see, and opens, moves, and closes panes. Every person in a pane is a Pi agent with its own home. beacond, a small box-wide registry, answers "which daemon serves this company" and admits exactly one daemon per company.

The code map, crate by crate, is in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Examples

Three companies you can copy and found in a minute. See examples/.

Example	The company
trading-desk	Meridian Desk, a paper-trading research desk: Research, Execution, and Risk, with Risk reviewing every trade memo.
growth-studio	Signal & Co., a growth and social agency: Content, Distribution, and a one-person Analytics unit.
oss-maintainers	Patchwork Labs, a company that maintains an open-source repo: Triage, Engineering, and Release.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and two large pieces of work are open right now.

1. Finish the web client. apps/web is a Next.js browser host for a company. Real code exists: the API and SSE client services, the hooks and providers, and unit suites that run in CI on every pull request. But it does not build a working host today, nothing a user installs contains it, and the terminal client is the product. apps/web/README.md describes what it was built to do and asks that a revival start with a Discussion, with a written account of what actually breaks.

2. Run departments on different machines. Today an entire company runs on the machine where its directory lives, and a company with many active people pegs that one machine's CPU. The goal is to let different departments be hosted on different machines. No design exists yet; bring proposals to Discussions.

Smaller work lives in the issue tracker. Setup, conventions, and the pull-request contract are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Where to read next

If you want to	Read
Understand what a company is	docs/WHAT_IS_A_COMPANY.md
Operate one: disk layout, every command, the runtime	docs/OPERATING.md
Understand the code	docs/ARCHITECTURE.md
Contribute	CONTRIBUTING.md
Find any document	docs/README.md
Report a vulnerability	SECURITY.md

Licence

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE. Contributions are accepted under the Developer Certificate of Origin; sign your commits with git commit --signoff.