Arbiter

A self-improving intent engine for autonomous work.
Local-first; network optional.

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About

Arbiter is a multi-agent orchestration harness built to be secure, durable, and event-driven. While there are many excellent agent frameworks available, they often force you to choose between strict tool limits, durable memory, or real-time event routing. Arbiter provides all three.

The Arbiter runtime is a thin, event-streaming orchestration and intent engine for building agent specialists and integrating real-time reasoning functionality (such as routing webhooks and sensor data via glob matching). Anyone can use the runtime to own their harness and embed strict, constitution-driven agents into their own applications—without duct-taping a chat CLI to someone else's API. Arbiter's long-term goal is become a deterministic runtime for autonomous work.

One Event Model Everywhere

Mode	Command	For
Interactive	arbiter	Multi-pane TUI, global conversation store
Remote TUI	arbiter --connect <url>	Same TUI as a thin client of a remote arbiter --api
One-shot	arbiter --send <agent> "..."	Scripts, cron, CI
Server	arbiter --api	HTTP+SSE API, tenant-isolated, A2A v1.0

One binary. Shared storage under ~/.arbiter/. Provider keys (OpenRouter, Ollama, …) are the only external dependency for model calls.

Quick start

curl -fsSL https://arbiter.run/install.sh | sh

arbiter # local TUI

Linux binaries, source builds, Ollama, --send, --api, and --connect are in getting-started/local.

Documentation

• docs/getting-started — first agent reply
• docs/philosophy — why Arbiter is shaped this way
• docs/api/ — HTTP API, tenants, SSE, MCP, A2A, memory
• docs/cli/ — --init, --send, --api, --connect, env vars
• docs/tui/ — panes, keybindings, themes, sessions
• ROADMAP.md — phased plan toward 1.0 readiness
• CHANGELOG.md · CONTRIBUTING.md · SECURITY.md

Warning

Arbiter is experimental software and has not reached a stable v1.0. The event surface, agent constitutions, and HTTP shape are subject to change. TUI /exec is unsandboxed by default (confirm-gated host shell; set ARBITER_SANDBOX_IMAGE for Docker).

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.