Nous-OSS

NOUS — Neural Operations Unification System

Nous-OSS is a local-first agent operating system.

It is designed to provide structured orchestration, explicit memory control, model routing, and secure tool execution — without depending on a single model provider or centralized service.

The name is deliberate. Nous is Greek for "mind" — the faculty of intellectual apprehension, the highest form of thinking. The architecture is modeled on the structure of human consciousness. See the Mind Model (architecture reference).

Nous is not a chatbot wrapper.

It is a control plane for intelligent systems.

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Intro

Recent agent systems focus on autonomy but often blur execution boundaries, memory persistence, and model control. Nous approaches the problem differently.

The system is built around a Prefrontal Cortex model — a dedicated orchestration layer responsible for routing, reflection, memory gating, and tool authorization.

Models advise.

The Cortex decides.

Nous is designed to:

• Support local and remote models
• Operate offline when possible
• Enforce explicit memory writes
• Prevent ambient authority
• Isolate projects
• Prepare for a curated skills ecosystem

The goal is clarity, not chaos.

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Objective

The objective of Nous-OSS is to build a stable, extensible, local-first agent runtime that can serve as the foundation for:

• Personal agents
• Project-scoped AI systems
• Tool-driven automation
• Secure skill distribution
• Enterprise-grade policy enforcement
• A curated skills marketplace

Nous prioritizes:

• Deterministic architecture
• Explicit control over execution
• Transparent memory systems
• Role-based model routing
• Capability-gated tool access
• Cross-platform compatibility

This is infrastructure, not a prompt experiment.

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Roadmap

Nous development is structured in nine phases.

1. The Skeleton — self/ structure, interfaces, web chat UI, basic routing, basic Cortex
2. The Nervous System — Full STM/LTM, memory write gating, basic retrieval
3. Basic Project Model — Project types, memory access policies, cross-project enforcement
4. The Learning Loop — Experience records, sentiment, distillation, confidence-governance
5. The Workflow Engine — Node-based execution, per-node governance, scheduler, artifacts
6. Cross-Project Intelligence — Knowledge-index, meta-vectors, taxonomy, discovery
7. The Package Ecosystem — SDK, sandbox, skill and project packages
8. Marketplace and Governance — Registry, signing, distribution
9. Extended Senses — Messaging bridge, voice, full workflow editor, mobile

→ See: Roadmap Overview (engineering roadmap — in .architecture/ submodule)

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Nous-OSS is built deliberately.

Architecture first.
Ecosystem second.
Scale last.