Clean brain. Thinking tentacles. Life finds a way.
Biological octopuses solve control with intent, local action, and feedback. Their arms sense and correct near the environment, then send compact signals back.
Octopus brings that shape to local agents. The main brain keeps the Goal, memory, Need, and Feed clean. A tentacle carries its own LLM prompt, runtime metadata, permissions, Go packages, session code, and trajectory. It chooses how to act, checks the result, and returns Feed.
Goal -> Brain -> Need -> Tentacle intelligence -> Go action -> Feed -> Brain
Heartbeat -> trajectory -> memory beat / harness beat
curl -fsSL https://dangozhang.github.io/Octopus/install.sh | sh
octopus oauth login codex
octopus start --check
octopus pet desktopoctopus oauth login codex reuses an existing Codex OAuth session when available, then prepares .octopus/llm.env; if no session exists, it falls back to Codex login. start --check must pass a live model probe before Octopus runs. The desktop pet reads real state only: Need, action, Feed, memory, harness evolution, and blocked status.
octopus goal set "make the math tentacle solve one small task and improve its Go package from the trace"
octopus chat "continue"The user changes the Goal. The brain asks for Need. The tentacle writes and runs session Go code. Repeated behavior moves into reusable Go packages. The beats summarize memory and propose Go harness changes from real traces.
0.3.0 pins tentacle execution to Go. Rust keeps the core loop and boundary. Editable harness code lives under tentacles/field-mini-task/: internal/fieldworker/common owns Task/Feed artifacts, each field owns its reusable Go package, and each run writes session Go source under .octopus-runtime/. The bundled fields are filesystem seed data, not a Rust enum or a closed list; a tentacle can add a new field pack and Go package from trace evidence.
The public path is Codex OAuth, local runtime check, desktop pet observation, LLM-planned Go execution, Feed trace recording, and LLM-selected Go package evolution.
MIT.