Overview

What Nika OS is

Nika OS is the agentic runtime used to automate intellectual work. It is not a chatbot. It is not a bag of scripts. It is a system that:

• Orchestrates swarms of agents (MCP-compatible CLI-agent instances, called “pods”) through a real-time inter-process communication layer.
• Persists knowledge across three memory tiers: working memory, episodic memory, semantic memory.
• Evolves its own strategies through prompt-optimization tournaments (inspired by the GEPA research, 2025) — without ever mutating its kernel.
• Routes requests to the right CLI backend based on cost, latency, expected quality, and sovereignty.
• Drives an online controller that adjusts agent hyperparameters from observed signals.

The “OS” terminology is deliberate: we treat agents as processes, memory as a filesystem, IPC as a system bus, and hooks as POSIX signals.

Why this design

A demanding workload is not chatbot territory. A quality-control station receives thousands of measurements a day, a machine setpoint shifts every batch, an operator changes shift every few hours. A naive assistant that restarts from scratch each session has no chance. The system must:

1. Hold over time — memory beyond a single context window.
2. Separate kernel from harness — engraved invariants, mutable parameters.
3. Learn from stress — antifragility in Taleb’s sense, not just robustness.
4. Trace every action — auditability by default, append-only JSONL trail.

Architecture in one picture

                      ┌─────────────────────┐
        user ───────▶ │       Kernel        │ ◀── lifecycle hooks
                      │   orchestrator      │     (SessionStart,
                      └──────────┬──────────┘      PostToolUse, Stop)
                                 │
                  ┌──────────────┼──────────────┐
                  ▼              ▼              ▼
              ┌───────┐      ┌───────┐      ┌───────┐
              │ Pod A │      │ Pod B │      │ Pod C │   CLI-agent
              └───┬───┘      └───┬───┘      └───┬───┘   instances
                  │              │              │
        ┌─────────┴──────────────┴──────────────┴─────────┐
        │                                                 │
        ▼                                                 ▼
  ┌──────────────┐                              ┌───────────────────┐
  │  Semantic    │                              │   IPC bus         │
  │  memory      │                              │  (Redis Streams + │
  │  (Qdrant)    │                              │   JSONL bus)      │
  └──────────────┘                              └───────────────────┘

Who this site is for

This documentation describes the internals of Nika OS for three audiences:

• AI/data engineers who want to understand how to structure multi-agent systems in production.
• Researchers interested in the practical application of recent techniques (GEPA, prompt evolution, online probabilistic control).
• Users and integrators who want to know what actually runs behind the deliverables they receive.

This documentation describes the mechanism — how the system works — in a timeless way. Current execution state (what is running, what is in progress) lives in the status channels, not in this doc.