Omnis¶

An AI operating system. Talk to your machine, and it does the thing.

"Install Rust, give me a Windows VM with Photoshop, put the daemon on my workstation and the interface here, and make it look like Zed" is a sentence, not an afternoon. Omnis takes it, writes the change into one declaration, shows you exactly what it will do, and applies it. If you don't like the result, you roll it back — one command, every time, whatever changed.

It is very smart because it can see the whole machine: your repositories, terminals, packages, containers, guest operating systems, browser, and secrets are one system with one API, and the agent is a first-class operator of it rather than a chat box bolted onto an editor.

Underneath, Omnis is a kernel. It owns nothing you could get elsewhere — git, sl, Nix, podman, libvirt, Chromium, Tailscale, and the coding-agent CLIs are all bound, not built — and everything that makes them compose: one bus, one scene tree, one declaration, one modification surface, one audit trail.

Status: specification. The governance rules and the autonomous delivery pipeline are in place and running. The product tree is not: it is specified in ARCHITECTURE.md, decided in decision records, and sequenced in ROADMAP.md.

The whole machine, in one file¶

Subsystems, guest operating systems, where each process runs, and how it looks are one declaration. Applying it produces a generation — a parent, a diff, an author — so rollback is one operation and an agent reconfiguring your machine leaves a reviewable change rather than a mutation.

{
  omnis = {
    hosts.core.backend = "docker";        # native · docker · wsl · podman · nspawn · remote
    placement = { daemon = "core"; gui = "workstation"; };

    subsystems.vcs = {
      enable   = true;
      backends = [ "git" "sapling" ];     # drop one and it leaves entirely — binary,
      default  = "git";                   # completions, credential helper, menu entries, all
    };

    environments.windows = {
      kind = "vm";                        # container · vm · compat (Wine/Proton)
      apps.integration = "remoteapp";     # Windows apps as ordinary windows
    };

    presentation = { profile = "zed"; theme = "catppuccin-mocha"; };
    remote = { enable = true; via = "tailscale"; };
  };
}

The full reference is examples/omnis.nix.

Removing something removes it completely — the processes, the packages, the files, and everything it contributed to the rest of the system. "Disabled" and "not installed" are not different states.

What makes it AI-first¶

Not a chat panel. An agent is a first-class operator: it calls the same API as you, reads the same option schema the settings UI is generated from, addresses the same objects by the same URIs, and is bound by the same approval gate and audit trail.

That is only safe because every change is a generation — gated before it takes effect, reversible after. The accountability machinery is not a constraint on the goal; it is what makes the goal achievable.

The documentation is generated from that same option schema and lives inside the product, so you read about the system in the window you are declaring it in — and so does the agent proposing the change.

Start here¶

How work happens here¶

user request  ──▶  Request issue      ──▶  interpretation  ──▶  you comment `approve`
                   (verbatim wording)      (agent)
                                                    │
                                                    ▼
                   Plan issue (sub-issue) ──▶  you comment `approve`
                                                    │
                                                    ▼
                   branch ─▶ Draft PR (bot-authored) ─▶ self-review loop ─▶ plan alignment
                                                    │
                                                    ▼
                   you Approve  ──▶  auto-merge  ──▶  issues closed, board set to Done

Two human gates before anything is written, one before anything merges. Specification runs architecture → decision records → roadmap → issues, and an issue is only filed for work that is already settled.

Full rules in AGENTS.md; mechanics in notes/pipeline.md.

Local development¶

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
pytest -v                    # repository automation tests
black --check .              # formatting
properdocs serve             # documentation site

Reproduce the GitHub-side configuration — labels, board, protection, permissions — at any time:

python .github/scripts/repo_settings.py --plan     # show drift
python .github/scripts/repo_settings.py --apply    # reconcile

License¶

GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.