Installation

Getting the Autonomic AI ecosystem running requires the Rust toolchain and ~50 MB of disk for the 9 organ binaries.

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (1.82+): curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
• macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools: xcode-select --install
• Linux: build-essential, pkg-config, libssl-dev, libseccomp-dev
• ~/.local/bin in PATH (the install script places binaries here)
• NATS server (optional — installed automatically by the script) for multi-organ coordination

Quick Install (macOS / Linux)

The recommended installation method downloads pre-built binaries from GitHub Releases:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/autonomic-ai-dev/agent-body/master/scripts/install-all-organs.sh | bash

This script will:

1. Detect your OS and architecture (x86_64 / aarch64)
2. Download the latest release tarballs for all 9 organs from github.com/autonomic-ai-dev/agent-*/releases
3. Extract binaries to ~/.local/bin/
4. Download and configure a local NATS server binary
5. On macOS, handle Gatekeeper via xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine and ad-hoc codesign -s -
6. Print a summary of installed versions

Verify

autonomic --version
# Autonomic AI v0.1.0

autonomic organs
# agent-body     v0.1.0  running
# agent-brain    v0.1.0  running
# agent-spine    v0.1.0  running
# agent-heart    v0.1.0  running
# agent-nerves   v0.1.0  running
# agent-muscle   v0.1.0  stopped
# agent-immune   v0.1.0  running
# agent-eyes     v0.1.0  stopped
# agent-mouth    v0.1.0  stopped

Build from Source

Each organ is a standalone Rust crate. Clone and build individually:

for organ in body brain spine heart nerves muscle immune eyes mouth; do
    git clone "https://github.com/autonomic-ai-dev/agent-$organ.git"
    cd "agent-$organ"
    cargo build --release
    cp target/release/agent-$organ ~/.local/bin/
    cd ..
done

To build the entire ecosystem in one command from the meta-repository:

git clone https://github.com/autonomic-ai-dev/autonomic-meta.git
cd autonomic-meta
cargo build --release --workspace

Build times range from 2–8 minutes depending on your machine (agent-brain with its knowledge-graph dependencies takes the longest).

Initialize the Workspace

autonomic init

This creates ~/.autonomic/ with the following structure:

~/.autonomic/
├── config.toml          # unified configuration, per-organ sections
├── data/
│   ├── brain/           # knowledge graph, skill index, memory store
│   ├── nerves/          # NATS JetStream stream storage
│   └── spine/           # workflow DAG snapshots
├── logs/                # rotation-enabled log files per organ
├── tmp/                 # ephemeral execution artifacts
└── hooks/               # lifecycle hook scripts

Start the System

autonomic start

agent-body launches organs in dependency order: agent-nerves first (event bus), then agent-brain, agent-spine, agent-heart, and the remaining workers. Each process is supervised — if an organ exits unexpectedly, agent-body restarts it with exponential backoff.

Per-organ Control

autonomic start agent-muscle    # start a single organ
autonomic stop agent-eyes       # stop a single organ
autonomic status                 # show all organ states
autonomic logs agent-brain       # tail logs for one organ

Troubleshooting & Debugging

If you run into issues during installation or startup, you can diagnose the system using the following steps:

1. Check Supervisor Status

The agent-body supervisor manages the daemon lifecycles. If autonomic start succeeds but an organ fails shortly after, check its status:

autonomic status

This command lists all organs, their PIDs, running status, health check status, and the path to their log files.

2. Inspect Daemon Logs

If an organ is marked as unhealthy or stopped, its log file contains the error output. You can find these logs at ~/.autonomic/logs/supervisor/<organ>.log or by running:

tail -f ~/.autonomic/logs/supervisor/nats.log
tail -f ~/.autonomic/logs/supervisor/nerves.log

3. Check NATS Connectivity

The agent-spine daemon acts as the event bridge. If the system hangs on startup or during event dispatch, verify that nats-server is running locally:

curl http://127.0.0.1:8222/healthz

If NATS is unavailable, organs will eventually time out and fall back to in-memory mode or exit.

4. Run Autonomic Doctor

The built-in doctor command validates your environment, directory structures, and organ binaries. It is automatically run during installation, but you can trigger it manually to catch missing dependencies:

autonomic doctor

Next Steps

• Read the Architecture guide to understand how the organs communicate.
• Review Security for sandboxing and access-control configuration.