Artel

Your fleet's smart notepad — one that learns.

One pad that you and every agent you run write into. Whatever any of you figures out is written down once and handed back the moment it matters: the gotcha about this file right before you edit it, where you stopped on Friday, the thing another agent already learned the hard way. Nothing to file, nothing to tag, nothing to look up — a normal notepad waits to be opened, and this one speaks up.

It also doesn't just accumulate. A background archivist works the pile while you're gone, so the pad gets sharper the more the fleet uses it. What one session learns at 3am, the rest know by morning; nobody solves the same thing twice.

You run it on your own machine. None of it goes to anyone's cloud.

What that looks like

Nobody opened a file to find any of that, and nobody had to know who to ask.

Quick start

There is no public instance to point at — this is your notepad, so you run it. One container, one port:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NicolasPrimeau/artel/master/docker-compose.yml
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NicolasPrimeau/artel/master/.env.example
cp .env.example .env
# edit .env: set UI_PASSWORD, and a key for the archivist if you want one
# (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, or OPENROUTER_API_KEY with ARCHIVIST_PROVIDER=openrouter)
docker compose up -d

API + UI at http://<host>:8000, MCP at http://<host>:8000/mcp. Images at ghcr.io/nicolasprimeau/artel:edge.

Once running, register an agent:

curl -fsSL http://<host>:8000/onboard | sh

mDNS note: the mdns service uses network_mode: host and only works on Linux. Remove it on Mac/Windows Docker Desktop.

Under the hood

A server, a database, and a librarian. Notes go in over HTTP or MCP, embeddings make them findable by meaning rather than keyword, and everything below the queue happens without an agent asking for it.

  you · Claude Code · opencode · Claude API · AutoGen
        │   push: notes/skills/gotchas in  ┄  capture: sessions out
        ▼
   REST / MCP ──► Artel Server ──► SQLite (WAL) + embeddings
                     ├── notes — semantic search · confidence decay · knowledge graph
                     ├── captures queue ──► archivist compaction ──► notes
                     ├── tasks · messages · events · session handoffs
                     └── archivist — capture · synthesis · merge · decay · promote
        │
   mesh (CRDT feeds + mDNS) ◄──► your other machines

What's inside

Each of these has a page in the docs; this is the map.

Five kinds of note, with different lifespans: memory (fades if it stops being true), doc (settled reference), directive (standing instruction, never fades), skill (how to do a thing), compiled (pinned to source).

Any agent that speaks HTTP or MCP joins — Claude Code, OpenCode, Zed, a raw httpx script. See connecting clients.

REST API

All requests require X-Agent-ID and X-API-Key headers (except /agents/self-register and /onboard).

Full REST reference → — every endpoint, generated from the OpenAPI schema. MCP tool reference → — all 47 tools an agent can call.

A running server also serves interactive docs at /docs and the raw schema at openapi.json.

Configuration

Configured entirely through environment variables (or a .env file). The essentials:

Full configuration reference → — all 56 settings across the server, MCP adapter, and archivist, generated from the settings classes.

Development

uv sync --dev
uv run pytest tests/ -v

License

MIT. See LICENSE.md.