Turtles is a minimalist, recursive, natively asynchronous agent runtime. It is meant to be used as a foundation for an agent framework that builds itself over time.

All agents get a dispatch tool, allowing them to distribute tasks to new agents while continuing their own work. If an agent suitable to the task does not already exist, the builder agent will create one, along with the necessary tools. Agents will probably call this forever and never actually accomplish anything.

It's turtles all the way down!

Warning

Experimental. Agents have shell access in the installed environment. There is currently no depth control for dispatch calls. Do not give turtles access to valuable data or unrestricted API keys.

Quickstart

Requires Bun and Docker.

cp .env.example .env                  # API_KEY and BASE_URL for any OpenAI-compatible API
cp config.example.json config.json    # model identifiers
bun run turtles                       # build, start sandboxed in Docker, open the CLI

The observer UI is at http://localhost:5505.

bun run down stops everything. To wipe data and start fresh, add -v