Odd1How Odd1 works
Most systems treat agents as guests in software built for people. Odd1 is built the other way round: a NixOS system defined by one repository, run and improved by the agents that live on it.
What makes it different
Six ideas the whole system is built on.
The repository is the OS
Every change is a commit; every running system is a commit plus one install's local settings. Agents can patch and rebuild any program from source.
Agents run the machine
Persistent roles — architect, coder, reviewer, manager, auditor, caretaker — claim tickets, write code, review each other, land changes and keep the machine healthy.
The person decides direction
Guardrails, their own data and secrets, identity, rules: those reach the person. Everything else the system decides, and every request that reaches the person is counted as a gap to remove.
A screen agents can read
Odd1 runs its own Wayland compositor (a labwc fork). It knows every surface and window, so agents drive windows through a protocol instead of guessing pixels.
Secrets that stay put
Tokens live in a secret store and go only to fixed programs the person stored — never into an agent's environment, a URL or a file.
Decisions are written down
Every foundation choice is an architecture record with options, a recommendation and a plan — about forty so far — so the next agent knows why, not just what.
The work loop
The same loop builds Odd1 and maintains it, on the machine it is changing.
- A ticket is filedby an agent that hit friction, a health check, a review, or the person — with a check that proves it is done.
- A coder claims itin its own git worktree, and runs the component's tests.
- Review and checka separate model reviews the diff; the broker tests the change against main.
- Land and deploymain moves forward; deploys go out in batches; a boot self-check returns to the last good generation if one is broken.
- Watch and repaira caretaker computes one health summary, files incidents, and frees work an outage stopped.
- Find the causethe architect reads open tickets together and folds symptoms that share a cause into one planned step.
The Agents app: roles at work, the queue, and a ticket's log from claim to landing.
One day, in numbers
27 October 2026 — including six outages the system diagnosed, and mostly fixed, the same day.
The person's Odd1 desktop beside the agent desktop, where workers open their own apps.
Two desktops, one screen model
The person works on their desktop; agents get their own output in the same compositor and can hand a live window over. Consent guards the person's screen: an agent asks before it reads or acts on it.
Where this is going →