temper

Agent-driven software development on a forge.

People decide what to build and why; agents do the work, from first draft to landed change.

The idea

• People direct, agents develop. People decide at the level of goals, designs and plans, and step in where agents cannot decide. Agents write, check, review and land the changes; feedback on code is their business.
• Mechanics are code, judgement is an LLM's. A change's way to landing is a procedure: checked by CI, reviewed by gates, repaired, brought up to date, landed through a queue per branch. An agent is woken only for what needs judgement: making a change, repairing a failure, reviewing, resolving a conflict, revising a plan.
• A careful guest on the forge. Repositories are adopted as they are. temper writes only to what it owns, never forces a push, and merges exactly the head its decision saw. A change it did not make to what it owns is drift: the work relying on it is held, and nothing is written over. Forgejo is the forge today.
• Built from the family. jig's engine runs the work, smith's agents do it under the charters temper writes and with the tools it serves, and skein carries the bytes, the forge's calls among them.
• One binary, standalone first. temper serve runs the engine and a worker on one person's machine, temper open is that person's terminal, and temper forge and temper box set up and run a forge beside it.
• Tested as it runs. Worlds with a fake forge and a fake LLM, then the real loop, then the binary against an owned Forgejo with its runner and real git, then a real model.

Start here

• docs/design/README.md: what temper is, what it is built from, and where each part of its design lives.
• docs/guide/box.md: a local temper box, with its own Forgejo, on loopback.
• docs/guide/github.md: GitHub connected from temper's client, through temper's own App.
• docs/guide/forgejo.md: a Forgejo connected from temper's client, managed, owned or connected.
• docs/design/STATUS.md: how far the code is from the design.
• skein's foundation, which temper follows: programming-model.md, testing-strategy.md and notes.md.

Before changing code, read AGENTS.md and docs/development/workflow.md. main moves only through skein's land, which runs the gate, scripts/check.sh.

The family

These are the repositories of Fabrig, an agent-driven software factory: write, prove, run.

Repository		Builds on
skein	One thread, one loop, no async
smith	Protocol-driven agent loop for AI applications	skein
jig	Engine for agentic applications	skein, smith
temper	Agent-driven software development on a forge	skein, smith, jig
hearth	Immutable machines, built from a revision	skein

Commands that read the deployment use <config>/temper.json and accept --config DIR --data DIR --cache DIR after their command words. Each flag falls back to TEMPER_CONFIG, TEMPER_DATA or TEMPER_CACHE, then the corresponding XDG directory under temper. Relative flags are joined to the working directory once at startup. Data and cache must be private.

temper init --config ./config --data ./data --cache ./cache writes the initial configuration, worker secret and charters. It refuses existing temper.json, worker.secret or worker.digest files.

After starting temper, open the accounts page and add an OpenAI API key. The initial configuration uses OpenAI's public Responses API. ChatGPT sign-in will be available later.