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---
## 🚀 What is Symbiont?
**Symbi** is a **Rust-native, zero-trust agent framework** for building autonomous, policy-aware AI agents.
It fixes the biggest flaws in existing frameworks like LangChain and AutoGPT by focusing on:
* **Security-first**: cryptographic audit trails, enforced policies, and sandboxing.
* **Zero trust**: all inputs are treated as untrusted by default.
* **Enterprise-grade compliance**: designed for regulated industries (HIPAA, SOC2, finance).
Symbiont agents collaborate safely with humans, tools, and LLMs — without sacrificing security or performance.
---
## ⚡ Why Symbiont?
| Language | Rust (safety, performance) | Python | Python |
| Security | Zero-trust, cryptographic audit | Minimal | None |
| Reasoning Loop | Typestate-enforced ORGA with policy gate | Simple chains | Ad-hoc |
| Knowledge Bridge | Vector search + episodic memory | RAG only | None |
| Policy Engine | Built-in DSL + Cedar | Limited | None |
| Deployment | REPL, Docker, HTTP API | Python scripts | CLI hacks |
| Audit Trails | Cryptographic logs | No | No |
---
## 🏁 Quick Start
### Prerequisites
* Docker (recommended) or Rust 1.88+
* No external vector database required (LanceDB embedded; Qdrant optional for scaled deployments)
### Run with Pre-Built Containers
```bash
# Parse an agent DSL file
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/workspace ghcr.io/thirdkeyai/symbi:latest dsl parse /workspace/agent.dsl
# Run MCP Server
docker run --rm -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/thirdkeyai/symbi:latest mcp
# Interactive development shell
docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/workspace ghcr.io/thirdkeyai/symbi:latest bash
```
### Build from Source
```bash
# Build dev environment
docker build -t symbi:latest .
docker run --rm -it -v $(pwd):/workspace symbi:latest bash
# Build unified binary
cargo build --release
# Run REPL
cargo run -- repl
# Parse DSL & run MCP
cargo run -- dsl parse my_agent.dsl
cargo run -- mcp --port 8080
```
---
## 🔧 Key Features
* ✅ **DSL Grammar** – Define agents declaratively with built-in security policies, `memory`, `webhook`, `schedule`, and `channel` blocks.
* ✅ **Agent Runtime** – Task scheduling, resource management, and lifecycle control.
* 🔄 **Agentic Reasoning Loop** – Typestate-enforced Observe-Reason-Gate-Act (ORGA) cycle with multi-turn conversation management, unified inference across cloud and local SLM providers, circuit breakers, and durable journal. Five implementation phases: core loop, policy integration, human-in-the-loop, multi-agent patterns, and observability.
* 🧠 **Knowledge-Reasoning Bridge** – Opt-in integration between the knowledge/context system and the reasoning loop. Injects relevant context before each reasoning step, exposes `recall_knowledge`/`store_knowledge` as LLM-callable tools, and persists learnings after loop completion.
* 🧪 **Advanced Reasoning Primitives** (`orga-adaptive`) – Feature-gated tool profile filtering (glob-based include/exclude, max cap, verified-only), per-step iteration tracking with stuck-loop detection (Levenshtein similarity), deterministic context pre-fetch (URL/file/issue/PR extraction with parallel resolution and token budgets), and directory-scoped convention retrieval.
* ⏰ **Cron Scheduling** – Persistent SQLite-backed cron engine with jitter, concurrency guards, dead-letter queues, and heartbeat pattern.
* 🧠 **Persistent Memory** – Markdown-backed agent memory with facts, procedures, learned patterns, daily logs, and retention-based compaction.
* 🪝 **Webhook Verification** – HMAC-SHA256 and JWT signature verification with GitHub, Stripe, and Slack presets.
* 🛡️ **Skill Scanning** – ClawHavoc scanner with 40 rules across 10 attack categories (reverse shells, credential harvesting, process injection, privilege escalation, network exfiltration, and more). 5-level severity model (Critical/High/Medium/Warning/Info) with executable whitelisting.
* 📈 **Metrics & Telemetry** – File and OTLP metric exporters with composite fan-out and background collection. OpenTelemetry distributed tracing spans for the reasoning loop.
* 🔒 **HTTP Security Hardening** – Loopback-only binding, CORS allow-lists, JWT EdDSA validation, health endpoint separation.
* 🔒 **Sandboxing** – Tier-1 Docker isolation for agent execution.
* 🔒 **SchemaPin Security** – Cryptographic verification of tools and schemas.
* 🔒 **AgentPin Identity** – Domain-anchored cryptographic identity for scheduled agents.
* 🔒 **Secrets Management** – HashiCorp Vault / OpenBao integration, AES-256-GCM encrypted storage.
* 🔑 **Per-Agent API Keys** – Argon2-hashed API key authentication with per-IP rate limiting.
* 🧠 **Context Compaction** – Automatic context window management with tiered compaction: LLM-driven summarization (Tier 1) and truncation (Tier 4). Multi-model token counting (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Llama, Mistral, and more).
* 📊 **RAG Engine** – Vector search (LanceDB embedded) with hybrid semantic + keyword retrieval. Optional Qdrant backend for scaled deployments.
* 🧩 **MCP Integration** – Native support for Model Context Protocol tools, plus Composio SSE integration for external tool access.
* 🤖 **AI Assistant Plugins** – First-party governance plugins for [Claude Code](https://github.com/thirdkeyai/symbi-claude-code) and [Gemini CLI](https://github.com/thirdkeyai/symbi-gemini-cli) with three-tier protection: awareness logging, blocking deny lists, and Cedar policy enforcement.
* 📡 **Optional HTTP API** – Feature-gated REST interface for external integration.
* 📋 **Delivery Routing** – Route scheduled agent output to webhooks, Slack, email, or custom channels.
* 📝 **AGENTS.md Support** – Bidirectional agent manifest generation and parsing for interoperability.
* ⚡ **Performance Verified** – Benchmarked claims: policy evaluation <1ms, ECDSA P-256 verification <5ms, 10k agent scheduling with <2% CPU overhead.
---
## 📦 Workspace Crates
| `symbi` | Unified CLI binary | Stable |
| `symbi-runtime` | Core agent runtime | Stable |
| `symbi-dsl` | DSL parser and evaluator | Stable |
| `symbi-channel-adapter` | Slack/Teams/Mattermost adapters | Stable |
| `repl-core` | REPL engine | Stable |
| `repl-proto` | JSON-RPC protocol | Stable |
| `repl-cli` | Interactive CLI + JSON-RPC server | Stable |
| `repl-lsp` | Language Server Protocol | Stable |
| `symbi-a2ui` | Admin dashboard (Lit/TypeScript) | Alpha |
### IDE / CLI Plugins
| [`symbi-claude-code`](https://github.com/thirdkeyai/symbi-claude-code) | Claude Code governance plugin | Stable |
| [`symbi-gemini-cli`](https://github.com/thirdkeyai/symbi-gemini-cli) | Gemini CLI governance extension | Stable |
---
## 📐 Symbiont DSL Example
```symbiont
metadata {
version = "1.0.0"
author = "Your Name"
description = "Data analysis agent"
}
agent analyze_data(input: DataSet) -> Result {
capabilities = ["data_analysis", "visualization"]
policy data_privacy {
allow: read(input) if input.anonymized == true
deny: store(input) if input.contains_pii == true
audit: all_operations
}
with memory = "persistent", requires = "approval" {
if (llm_check_safety(input)) {
result = analyze(input);
return result;
} else {
return reject("Safety check failed");
}
}
}
```
---
## 🔒 Security Model
* **Zero Trust** – all agent inputs are untrusted by default.
* **Sandboxed Execution** – Docker-based containment for processes.
* **Audit Logging** – Cryptographically tamper-evident logs.
* **Secrets Control** – Vault/OpenBao backends, encrypted local storage, agent namespaces.
---
## 📚 Documentation
* [Getting Started](https://docs.symbiont.dev/getting-started)
* [DSL Guide](https://docs.symbiont.dev/dsl-guide)
* [Runtime Architecture](https://docs.symbiont.dev/runtime-architecture)
* [Reasoning Loop Guide](https://docs.symbiont.dev/reasoning-loop)
* [Advanced Reasoning Primitives (orga-adaptive)](https://docs.symbiont.dev/orga-adaptive)
* [Security Model](https://docs.symbiont.dev/security-model)
* [API Reference](https://docs.symbiont.dev/api-reference)
---
## 🎯 Use Cases
* **Development & Automation**
* Secure code generation & refactoring.
* AI agent deployment with enforced policies.
* Knowledge management with semantic search.
* **Enterprise & Regulated Industries**
* Healthcare (HIPAA-compliant processing).
* Finance (audit-ready workflows).
* Government (classified context handling).
* Legal (confidential document analysis).
---
## 📄 License
* **Community Edition**: Apache 2.0 License
* **Enterprise Edition**: Commercial license required
Contact [ThirdKey](https://thirdkey.ai) for enterprise licensing.
---
*Symbiont enables secure collaboration between AI agents and humans through intelligent policy enforcement, cryptographic verification, and comprehensive audit trails.*
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<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThirdKeyAI/Symbiont/main/symbi-trans.png" alt="Symbi Logo" width="120">
</div>