What is a8e?

a8e (Articulate) is a local-first, privacy-respecting AI agent that runs entirely on your machine. It automates complex development tasks — building projects from scratch, writing and executing code, debugging failures, orchestrating workflows, and interacting with external APIs — autonomously.

a8e is a hard-fork of Goose (Apache 2.0), rebuilt with a focus on developer sovereignty:

• 100% Telemetry Free — zero PostHog, zero Sentry, zero data collection. Your code and conversations never leave your machine.
• BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) — works with any LLM provider: OpenRouter, Ollama, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more.
• MCP Native — first-class Model Context Protocol support for extensible tool integrations.
• Local First — designed to work offline with local models via Ollama / vLLM.

Quick Start

# One-line install (macOS / Linux)
curl -fsSL https://a8e.ai/install.sh | bash

# Or install via Cargo
cargo install a8e

# Configure your provider and model
a8e configure

# Start a session
a8e session

# Start with an initial prompt (interactive — stays open after the response)
a8e "explain this codebase"
a8e "write a hello world script in Go"

CLI Usage

   __ _  ___ ___
  / _` |( _ ) _ \   Articulate
 | (_| |/ _ \  __/   Speak Freely.
  \__,_| (_) \___|

Usage: a8e [PROMPT]...
       a8e <command>

Arguments:
  [PROMPT]...   Start an interactive session with an initial prompt
                e.g. a8e "explain this codebase"

Commands:
  session     Start an interactive session (optionally with a prompt)
  run         Run a single task (headless / non-interactive)
  configure   Configure providers, models, and extensions
  info        Show version and configuration

Prompt input methods:
  a8e "write a script"           # top-level prompt → interactive session
  a8e session "write a script"   # same, via session subcommand
  a8e run --text "write a script" # headless (exits after response)
  a8e run -i instructions.txt    # headless from file
  a8e run -i -                   # headless from stdin
  echo "write a script" | a8e run -i -   # pipe into a8e

Architecture

a8e is built in Rust with a modular workspace:

Attribution

a8e is a hard-fork of Goose by Block, Inc., licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See NOTICE and LICENSE for details.

We stand on the shoulders of giants — and give back where we can.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE for the full text.