mahbot 0.4.0

An autonomous agentic engineering system that manages software development through role separation, subagents, and deterministic diagnostics.
Documentation
# MahBot

Mahbot(i.e. __my bot__) is an agentic development environment built for reliability and autonomy. It treats software work as a managed pipeline, not a chat session: you talk to the **Manager** about intent and scope; specialist agents do the actual work. Manager creates and refines tickets on the board, and only escalates real product decisions to you. 

**Reliability** comes from orchestration and process, not based on the expectation that the current frontier model will one-shot any task. 

**Autonomy** is achieved using the pipeline - you can request a large amount of work and manager will ensure that every piece is analyzed, implemented, reviewed, tested and commited.

Batteries included:
- __Smooth native GUI__ for the core pipeline management as well as code editor, diff viewer and shell
- __Modern agentic stuff__: subagents, adversarial review and QA, deterministic diagnostics
- __Telegram bot__ integration that allows you to easily manage the work from your smartphone
- __Voice control__ using a CPU-optimized local speech-to-text model that turns babble into features (passive wake-word detection wip)
- __Background maintenance__ process to clean up the usual videcoding bloat as well as other code quality issues
- __Full history__ of the previous work in the tickets with efficient hybrid search over it
- __Out-of-the-box__ workspace discovery for per-role contexts, auto-detected diagnostics commands. No need for plugins, AGENTS/CLAUDE/other.md files or custom configurations. Just add the API key and state your wishes
- __Specialized artist__ agent for image & video generation/editing as a little treat on top

At the moment only supports OpenRouter as the provider, and by default configured to use the DeepSeek 4 Flash. More providers will definitely be added in the future, but as of now that's the best price/performance/simplicity combo known to me. Also, should work quite well with smaller models like Qwen 3.8 27b, and local + open-source mode is the primary long-term focus.

## The Pipeline

Every ticket has a lifecycle with **redundant checks**:

| Phase | What happens |
|-------|----------------|
| **Backlog → Analysis** | Parallel analysts research and score the ticket's scope & premises |
| **→ Planning** | Manager checks the analysis results and either refines, cancels, moves into dev or asks the user |
| **→ Ready for dev** | Awaits in the engineer's queue according to it's priority |
| **→ In development** | Engineer implements the ticket or the required fixes |
| **→ In diagnostics** | Deterministic verification (format, lint, build, test) |
| **→ In review** | Agentic verification focused on the code quality |
| **→ In QA** | Agentic verification focused on the ticket's expectations |
| **→ Sanitation** | Check untracked/new files in the working tree |
| **→ Done** | Auto git commit with the ticket's title if the tree is dirty |

Circuit breaker pauses the work if a ticket goes through too many bounces, escalates to the manager and he handles from there.

## Getting Started

Currently mahbot can only be installed from `crates.io`:

```bash
cargo install mahbot
```

Then run `mahbot` to start the service, and you'll be asked to configure:

**Required:**
- OpenRouter API key

**Optional:**
- Exa and/or Firecrawl API keys — for the `web_search` tool
- Telegram bot token — remote chat on the same agent backend
- [`chrome-use`]https://github.com/leeguooooo/chrome-use CLI (browser tool and link enrichment)
  Install: `curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leeguooooo/chrome-use/main/install.sh | sh`
  (Windows users: download the `.exe` from [Releases]https://github.com/leeguooooo/chrome-use/releases)
  Requires the [Chrome extension]https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/chrome-use and native messaging host
  (run `chrome-use extension install` after installing the binary)

As of now mahbot is only regularly tested on macos, so it might have unexpected bugs on other platforms. However, all the core components are cross-platform so it should work just fine on windows & linux in the future.

Also, the same binary can be run with `mahbot debug -h` to execute read-only SQL queries over the service's DBs in an agent-friendly way.