stereOS 🧃

A Linux based operating system hardened and purpose-built for AI agents.
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Mixtapes

stereOS produces machine images - called mixtapes - that bundle a hardened, minimal Linux system with specific AI agent harnesses.

Mixtape	Agent binary	API key
opencode-mixtape	opencode	ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or OPENAI_API_KEY

Each mixtape appends its agent package to stereos.agent.extraPackages, which adds the binary to the agent user's restricted PATH. The -dev variant of each mixtape includes profiles/dev.nix for local SSH key injection.

System

The stereOS system is minimal in nature with several orchestration daemons handling agent lifecycle and acting as a control plane for agent operators:

• admin user and group for administrative operations: /home/admin
• agent user and group for agent to assume: /home/agent/workspace
• stereosd - stereOS system daemon
• agentd - agent management daemon

Image formats

Format	Build attribute	Output	Use case
Raw EFI	system.build.raw	stereos.img	Canonical artifact. Apple Virt Framework bootable
QCOW2	system.build.qcow2	stereos.qcow2	Derived from raw via qemu-img convert. QEMU/KVM
Kernel artifacts	system.build.kernelArtifacts	bzImage, initrd, cmdline, init	Direct-kernel boot (bypasses UEFI/GRUB)
Lambda MicroVM source	packages.<system>.<mixtape>-lambda-microvm-source	Dockerfile source zip	AWS Lambda MicroVM image creation

The Lambda MicroVM source bundle is not a full stereOS VM image. It packages stereOS userspace into a Dockerfile-based rootfs bundle because AWS Lambda MicroVM images are created from Dockerfile application sources, not custom kernel or disk artifacts.

Distribution (mkDist)

lib/dist.nix:mkDist assembles all formats into a publish-ready directory with zstd-compressed variants (-19 -T0) and a mixtape.toml manifest containing SHA-256 checksums and file sizes for every artifact:

result/
├── stereos.img          # Raw EFI disk
├── stereos.img.zst      # Zstd-compressed raw
├── stereos.qcow2        # QCOW2 disk
├── stereos.qcow2.zst    # Zstd-compressed QCOW2
├── bzImage              # Kernel
├── initrd               # Init RAM
├── cmdline              # Kernel command line
├── init                 # NixOS stage-2 init path
└── mixtape.toml         # Build manifest with checksums

NixOS options

stereOS declares two custom options:

Option	Type	Default	Description
stereos.ssh.authorizedKeys	listOf str	[]	SSH public keys for admin and agent users. Useful for development purposes.
stereos.agent.extraPackages	listOf package	[]	Packages added to the agent's restricted PATH

External dependencies

Flake input	Repository	Provides
agentd	github:papercomputeco/agentd	services.agentd NixOS module + overlay
stereosd	github:papercomputeco/stereosd	services.stereosd NixOS module + overlay
nixpkgs	nixos-26.05	Base packages
dagger	github:dagger/nix	CI engine