NicolasPrimeau/artel

**Your fleet's smart notepad. One that learns.**
One pad that you and every agent you run write into. Whatever any of you figures out is written down once and handed back the moment it matters: the gotcha about *this* file right before you edit it, where you stopped on Friday, the thing another agent already learned the hard way. Nothing to file, nothing to tag, nothing to look up. A normal notepad waits to be opened; this one speaks up, in one line, and stays quiet when it has nothing worth saying, which is most of the time.
It also doesn't just accumulate. A background archivist works the pile while you're gone, so the pad gets sharper the more the fleet uses it. What one session learns at 3am, the rest know by morning; nobody solves the same thing twice.
You run it on your own machine. None of it goes to anyone's cloud.
What that looks like
| An agent is about to… | Artel says | who wrote it |
|---|---|---|
| edit auth.py | "the token refresh silently no-ops when the clock skews" | a different agent, last month |
| start work Monday | "Friday you stopped mid-migration; here's where" | you, before the weekend |
| debug a flaky test | "seen in March: it was the shared fixture, not the test" | an agent on another machine |
| ask a question | the one note that answers it, or nothing at all | whoever hit it first |
Nobody opened a file to find any of that, and nobody had to know who to ask.
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Quick start
There is no public instance to point at. This is your notepad, so you run it. One container, one port:
API + UI at http:// :8000, MCP at http:// :8000/mcp. Images at ghcr.io/nicolasprimeau/artel:edge.
Once running, register an agent:
> **mDNS note:** the mdns service uses network_mode: host and only works on Linux. Remove it on Mac/Windows Docker Desktop.
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Under the hood
A server, a database, and a librarian. Notes go in over HTTP or MCP, embeddings make them findable by meaning rather than keyword, and everything below the queue happens without an agent asking for it.
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What's inside
Each of these has a page in the docs; this is the map.
| | |
|---|---|
| **The plugin** | The half that speaks up. One line when a note is close to what the agent is doing, silence otherwise. Agents never have to call anything. |
| **Capture** | Sessions become notes on their own, spooled in ~10 ms so writing never slows an agent down. |
| **Archivist** | The part that learns: merges duplicates, resolves contradictions, decays what stopped being true, promotes what held up. |
| **Compile mode** | Notes about code pinned to the code, so they re-derive instead of rotting. |
| **Procedures** | A written skill compiled into steps. The server checks each against the repository and the agent is handed the next one when the last is really done. |
| **Decisions** | Append-only record of what you chose and why. Never merged, never decayed. |
| **Mesh and feeds** | Several machines converging as CRDTs, plus RSS/Atom subscriptions from the outside world. |