Telos

A general agent that runs as a fleet of peers with coordinate teleport.

Telos is the headless execution layer, built on Zed's agent machinery with the telos concept fused on top. It receives commands from actus and converts them into system calls, tool invocations, and protocol traffic over files, processes, and networks. The working thesis is that an agent does not need to traverse trees to act: work is addressed by coordinate and reached by teleport, with no path walks, no directory descent, no sequential scans. The agent moves between work locations in space, and the execution layer materializes that movement as concrete system effects.

The final interface is a contract kept 1:1 with actus. The bootstrap started at the boundary: a mock agent emits the exact event sequences actus depends on, the conformance suite gates every change, and the internals were filled in behind that stable surface. The headless agent core now runs end to end over a WebSocket contract with a stub backend for deterministic, LLM-free conformance runs.

Headless runtime

The single binary (crates/telos, built as tel) wires gpui as a headless application and entity runtime: no editor, workspace, windowing, or rendering code exists in the build graph. The UI layer of the absorbed Zed core was removed, and the remaining runtime is covered by unit tests on a window-free harness (TestDispatcher/TestPlatform/TestAppContext) that keeps the reactive entity, executor, and session machinery deterministic.

Suites green on the headless harness: gpui 90, agent 733, acp_thread 124, context_server 97, agent_servers 31, terminal 86, plus project unit and context-server-store coverage.

The agent honors the actus launch contract: --user-data-dir pins the settings and credentials root before settings init, so actus-injected LLM configuration and context_servers MCP entries load into the process. MCP tool exposure is profile-gated and covered by the agent MCP tests.

Position in the stack

Layer	Project	Role
Physical foundation	Chton (tagma)	coordinates over disk, RAM, network
Data hub	Nexus	logs, snapshots, state over the coordinate space
Verification	EV and peers	mathematical verification of coordinate operations
Intelligence	Actus	planning with the LLM, domain knowledge
Execution	Telos	command intake, system call conversion, ACP/MCP execution

Distribution

A prebuilt agent image is published to ghcr.io/ssccsorg/telos on main pushes and version tags (latest, main, and tag-named tags). The package is public, so any project can pull the binary without logging in and without building telos:

docker pull ghcr.io/ssccsorg/telos:latest
docker run --rm ghcr.io/ssccsorg/telos:latest /workspace/target/telos-release/tel --help

The stable binary path inside the image is /workspace/target/telos-release/tel; actus CI runs its real-agent conformance tier against that path. The stripped release binary is about 46 MiB; an unstripped debug build is around 279 MB.

The build disables language_models/extension-support, so wasm extension hosted LLM providers and the wasmtime/cranelift chain they drag in are compiled out; only the built-in anthropic, open_ai, and deepseek providers stay. The Zed sample extension tree and its benchmark were removed; the runtime keeps the extension crate for user-installed stores but ships no sample extensions.

Layout

• crates/telos: the single binary over the agent core (wire types, agent loop, and the tel entrypoint in one crate)
• crates/gpui: headless application and entity runtime (UI layer removed; README inside the crate describes the runtime shape)
• VENDORING.md: zed sync and derivation record; insight-mapping port procedure with the pinned base commit and current divergences
• docs/upstream-sync.md: upstream knowledge synchronization process
• index.qmd: project documentation at the SSCCS index level

Run

Build telos and attach it to actus:

cargo build --profile telos-release -p telos
# from the actus checkout:
TELOS_BIN=/path/to/this/repo/target/telos-release/tel LLM_API_KEY=dummy ./run.sh --test

The binary speaks the actus WebSocket contract: connect, agent_ready, chat, tools, completion. With TELOS_STUB_BACKEND=1 the agent responds with a fixed deterministic backend, so contract runs need no LLM key and no model variance.

The repository is private. When distributed, telos is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later; see the License section below.

License

Telos is licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later, with Apache-2.0 components where a crate's own Cargo.toml marks them as such (the absorbed Zed derived core follows the same dual marking upstream). The full license texts live in LICENSE (GPL-3.0-or-later) and LICENSE-APACHE, and the notice system is described in NOTICE.md. Third-party dependencies are governed by their own licenses and are reported via cargo-about (about.toml, regenerated by script/licenses-check.sh).