Curated core
SYSTEM.md, SOPs, skills, scripts, tests, manifest. You never edit the core — you pull new versions like any dependency.
TAO
The Agent Observatory
Curated, portable, operational AI agents. Inspect the dossier. Understand the authority boundaries. Take one home.
What TAO is
Engineered colleagues, not prompt libraries.
TAO is not a skill marketplace, a prompt library, or a collection of character cards. It is a registry of complete operational agents — packages with curated SOPs, deterministic scripts, orchestration, adaptation workflows, and evidence-based verification.
Each agent ships as a versioned package with a clear operating doctrine, bounded authority, and an induction workflow that adapts it to your environment without touching the curated core.
Two-layer portability
Local adaptation
Accounts, regions, paths, tools, approvals. Induction interviews your environment, observes what's safe, and produces a local overlay — without touching the curated core.
The invariant: local adaptation may tighten authority or replace environment bindings, but must never silently weaken safety constraints or verification requirements.
How it works
Four-step journey from discovery to deployment.
Discover
Browse the registry of available agents. Each entry lists maturity, authority model, supported platforms, and surfaces it covers — so you know what you're getting before you commit.
Inspect
Open the dossier. Every agent publishes its SYSTEM.md, agent.yaml manifest, SOPs, and scripts. Read the authority boundaries, the taskrail structure, and the induction workflow. Satisfy yourself it does what it claims and nothing else.
Induct
Clone the agent and run pi run induct. The induction workflow interviews your environment, detects platforms and tools, proposes safe bindings, and generates a local adaptation layer — no manual configuration, no silent surprises.
Deploy
Run tasks through the agent's SOPs. Each operation collects evidence, proposes actions, stops at approval gates, executes through bounded wrappers, verifies results, and produces a full audit trail. You always know what changed and how to undo it.
Philosophy
Operational, not theatrical
Judged by repeatable behaviour, not impressive persona paragraphs. An agent that produces verifiable audit logs is worth a thousand character descriptions.
LLM inside the cockpit
Scripts establish facts. SOPs establish sequence. The LLM handles judgment, novelty, and natural-language reasoning — within bounded guardrails, not free-roaming.
Authority is explicit
Every agent declares exactly what it can read, propose, mutate, and destroy. Per-surface approval gates mean you approve each change individually. No inference, no assumptions.
Verification is part of the task
No task completes without evidence. After every mutation, the agent re-probes, compares before and after, and records the result. Completion requires proof, not self-assertion.
Small roster, high trust
Five excellent operational units beat five thousand character cards. Every agent in the registry earns its place through reliable behaviour, clear documentation, and a well-defined scope.
Explore the registry
Each agent has a full dossier — authority model, platform compatibility, taskrail structure, and induction workflow. Inspect before you induct.