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Documentation

Developer documentation for Acolyte, a terminal-first AI coding agent.

Acolyte is built around explicit runtime concepts: sessions, tasks, lifecycle phases, and tool contracts. Each piece has a defined boundary and a typed interface. The documentation below explains how these concepts fit together and how the system behaves during execution.

Overview

  • Getting Started — Install Acolyte and run your first session in under a minute.
  • Features — Shipped, user-visible capabilities of Acolyte as a terminal-first AI coding agent.
  • Why Acolyte — An open-source AI coding agent built for observable execution and full developer control.

Architecture

  • Architecture — Headless daemon with typed RPC connecting CLI, editors, and custom clients over a shared protocol.
  • Workspace — How Acolyte resolves, scopes, and enforces workspace behavior for each request.
  • Lifecycle — Learn how Acolyte processes every task through resolve, prepare, generate, and finalize.
  • Errors — Error contracts, runtime classes, and recovery boundaries in Acolyte.

Runtime

  • TUI — Acolyte's custom React terminal UI with fuzzy search, autocomplete, model picker, and AST-based code editing.
  • Tooling — How Acolyte executes tools through layered contracts, guards, and evaluators with full runtime observability.
  • Sessions — How Acolyte tracks chat context, message history, and session storage backends.
  • Tasks — Task lifecycle, queue policy, and state transitions in Acolyte.
  • Memory — How Acolyte persists structured facts across session, project, and user tiers using proactive distillation.
  • Cloud — Portable agent identity via cloud-hosted memory and sessions.

Reference

  • CLI — Command reference for the Acolyte CLI including chat, run, server, memory, config, logs, and trace commands.
  • Configuration — Available configuration keys for models, providers, memory, permissions, and runtime behavior.
  • Protocol — Transport-facing contract between client and server for building Acolyte integrations.
  • Localization — How Acolyte separates translatable copy from protocol contracts.
  • Updates — Versioning, auto-update, and breaking change policy for Acolyte.
  • Glossary — Glossary of Acolyte terminology covering sessions, tasks, lifecycle phases, guards, evaluators, and memory tiers.
  • Testing — Test strategy and conventions used in the Acolyte codebase.