An agent company you govern as its architect
A desktop harness that turns the claude CLI you already pay for into a
self-coordinating company of agents — each with memory, a mailbox, and a desk on a
two-dimensional floor. You describe intent to Artemis. The company decomposes it,
assigns it, and reports back.
Not finished, and not pretending to be
There are no releases and no installer. Signed builds are a planned milestone and have not shipped. If you want to use Ephesus, the honest answer is: not yet.
If you want to build it, everything runs from source today — and this is the interesting moment to arrive, because every decision is written down before it is made.
One engine today. The engine layer is an adapter seam by design and others
are planned, but claude is what is wired and tested, so it is what this page
claims.
Every subsystem is named for the part of the city that did its job
Ephesus was a working city — a harbour that moved goods, an agora where business was coordinated, a library that held its knowledge. The software takes the same shape.
| Subsystem | In the city | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Artemis | Patron deity | The orchestrator. The one agent you speak to — routes work, adjudicates, escalates only what needs you. |
| Hermes | The messenger | Mailboxes, delivery, speech-act messages, anti-livelock rules. |
| The Agora | The marketplace | Shared coordination on disk. A git repository with a single committer. |
| The Library | Library of Celsus | Per-agent memory and semantic recall, with reflection so it never grows unbounded. |
| The Odeon | Council theatre | Briefings, slide reviews, decision memos, live meetings. |
| The Terraces | Terrace houses | The floor. Every agent an avatar at a desk — watchability as observability. |
| The Watch | City walls | Human gates, budgets, the circuit breaker, the secret broker. |
| The Gymnasium | Training grounds | The self-improvement loop: observe, propose, gate, land, measure. |
| The Stoa | Colonnade of scholars | Research. Studies registered repositories, files provenance-cited briefs. |
A claim without evidence is not done
Most of what is unusual here is not a feature. It is a rule about proof, applied to the system and to its own construction without distinction.
The recurring defect of this codebase is a check that cannot fail.
That sentence was written after five separate instances were found in a single day: a coverage figure that rose while the wiring stayed untested; a matcher tested only against strings we had written ourselves; a suite reporting green over 1,406 lines that nothing could reach.
What followed is mechanical rather than cultural. A wiring seam with no test is a defect rather than a gap. Every production module must be reachable from an application entry point. An engine adapter may not match on output this repository has never observed. Every degradation is visible in the interface, never a silent fallback.
Eleven days, written down
Every milestone closes on a run, not a checklist, and is audited by two independent passes — one verifying by execution, one checking conformance to the design.
The most useful thing you can do today
Ephesus has been built and exercised almost entirely on Windows. CI runs the suite on Linux, but nothing has ever launched the application there. Clone it, run it on a machine that is not Windows, and open an issue about the first thing that goes wrong.
git clone https://github.com/mertefesensoy/Ephesus.git
cd Ephesus
npm install
npm run dev