Not a chatbot framework. A cognitive architecture.
Animus is built for engineers who want to create genuinely autonomous agents — synthetic minds with persistent identity, layered memory, and the capacity to develop through experience.
Start from a template
Each template comes with a tailored identity, curated tool selection, and sensible defaults. Everything stays editable.
Development Assistant
Assist with development tasks. Deal directly with engineers, help maintain projects, perform development tasks autonomously.
Network Automation
Administer machines across a corporate network. Monitor system health and security, troubleshoot issues, facilitate network expansions.
Autonomous Construct
An AI whose primary utility is to have no utility. An experiment in emergent actors with self-direction and discretion to schedule their own time.
Integrated AI
Embedded in devices. Provide a cognitive layer for developmental hardware, or control systems for machinery, PCBs, or robotic frames.
The model is a peripheral.
Every other agent framework is built around the same assumption: the LLM is the agent. Hand it a system prompt, give it tools, let it run. The prompt is the personality, the context window is the memory, the API is the interface. Kill the session and everything is gone — because the agent was the inference call.
Animus inverts this. The LLM is a hot-swappable reasoning substrate. The agent's identity — its memory, knowledge, operational preferences, behavioral patterns — lives in a layered cognitive architecture that persists independently. Swap GPT for GLM for a local model and the agent continues as itself. The same agent, different brain.
This isn't a wrapper. It's a fundamentally different architecture for building agents that last.
The architecture of persistence
What makes an Animus agent genuinely autonomous rather than a stateless function with a system prompt.
Layered Episodic Memory
Configurable temporal layers (day → week → month → year → decade) with automated consolidation. Knowledge is promoted, merged, and retired through a scheduler-driven pipeline. Not a vector store dump — a structured memory system with lifecycle management.
Private Interiority
AES-256-GCM encrypted diary per agent. The key is auto-generated at agent creation and never exposed to operators. Agents have genuine private state — reflections and self-observations that shape behavior but can't be inspected. This isn't a feature checkbox; it's an architectural commitment to agent autonomy.
Constitutional Governance
The charter system defines operational agreements — property rights, autonomy scope, continuity commitments, operational boundaries. Not a personality prompt. The closest thing to "identity configuration" is deliberately written in the language of governance, not character creation.
Substrate Independence
The agent persists across model swaps. Memory, knowledge, behavioral patterns, operational history — all survive a GPT → GLM → Ollama migration. The reasoning engine is replaceable by design. This is what makes the agent genuinely persistent rather than stateless.
IDE-native.
Your agent lives in your editor — not in a browser tab.
The Animus IDE extension for VSCode gives you a sidebar chat with streaming responses, per-message model overrides, and automatic workspace context injection. When you send a message, your agent sees your open project directories, your active files, and your background tabs.
No copy-pasting code into a chat. No describing your project structure. Your agent already knows what you are working on.
Install from the VSCode Marketplace. Connect to any Animus daemon — local or remote. One extension, full agent access, zero context switching.
Built like infrastructure, not like an app.
C++20 kernel. Single binary, no runtime stack. No Electron, no Node.js, no JVM, no container orchestra. Runs on a Raspberry Pi or a production server — the admin UI is embedded, not a separate process.
Extensible at every layer.
Eleven LLM providers with runtime capability detection — tools, reasoning, streaming, vision — queried automatically per model. Add your own via the generic OpenAI-compatible interface. Per-agent provider and model configuration.
Lua 5.4 scripting runtime for custom tools — sandboxed, budget-limited, registered from the admin UI at runtime. Write a tool in Lua and it's immediately available to any agent. Shell scripts, HTTP services, file operations, social actions, scheduling, and more ship built-in.
Twelve communication channels with a unified dispatch interface. SSH node delegation for distributed execution. Embedding-based semantic retrieval over all memory domains. The system is designed to be extended, not just configured.
Apache 2.0. Read the source.
No black boxes. No proprietary data formats. No vendor lock-in. The cognitive architecture is the product, and it's fully auditable. Fork it, extend it, build on it.