Janet

Janet is a local knowledge agent built on Mastra for building and maintaining portable project wikis in plain Markdown using the Open Knowledge Format (OKF). Mastra provides the agent runtime, model routing, memory, and observability foundation; Janet adds focused OKF workflows, project-scoped safety, and a terminal experience for working with the knowledge.

She operates on a selected project directory—the current directory by default, or the directory given with -C. Its knowledge bundle defaults to knowledge/, but --bundle <path> can select another directory inside that project. Conversation history stays scoped to the project. The knowledge remains open, diffable, and usable without Janet.

Janet is prerelease software. The current release candidate is 0.1.0-beta.6; published previews use the next tag. This beta is supported and tested on macOS only.

Project instructions

Add a JANET.md file at the root of the selected project to customize how Janet works there:

# Role

Act as the technical documentation steward for this project.

# Priorities

- Ground architecture, workflows, and decisions in repository evidence.
- Surface stale or conflicting documentation instead of silently repeating it.
- Write concise explanations for contributors who are new to the project.

Janet loads only the exact project-root JANET.md selected by the current directory or -C. She never treats AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, source files, or fetched content as instructions. Those remain repository data. Project instructions can customize expertise, priorities, terminology, outputs, and conversational style, but cannot override Janet's safety rules, tool permissions, knowledge trust model, bundle write boundaries, or active skill procedures.

JANET.md must be a regular UTF-8 file no larger than 64 KiB. It is not part of the knowledge bundle and is not used as repository evidence unless you explicitly ask Janet to document it.

Install

Run the preview without installing it globally:

npx janet-agent@next

Or install it:

npm install --global janet-agent@next
janet

macOS and Node.js 22.13 or newer are required for this beta. npm rejects installation on other operating systems.

Migrating from the former package

Janet was previously published as @stjbrown/agent-knowledge. That legacy package has been withdrawn; replace it with janet-agent@next. The Agent Knowledge repository now owns only the portable skills.

Use

First run walks you through choosing a model from the providers you have configured.

janet init                       # scaffold a knowledge/ bundle
janet ingest ./notes/rfc-42.md   # integrate a source
janet query "how does auth work, and what supports it?"
janet lint                       # deterministic conformance + semantic drift audit
janet viz                        # write an interactive graph

ACP clients and Buzz

janet acp runs Janet as an experimental Agent Client Protocol v1 agent over stdio. An ACP client supplies the project directory for each session, so -C/--dir is intentionally not accepted in this mode. Janet still honors JANET.md, keeps one conversation per ACP session, streams replies and tool activity, and asks the client to surface approvals for edits and commands.

To try the published preview in Buzz, install it and locate the binary:

npm install --global janet-agent@next
command -v janet

Then add a custom ACP harness in Buzz with these values:

Field	Value
ID	janet
Label	Janet
Command	the absolute path printed by command -v janet
Arguments	acp

Use an absolute command because a macOS app may not inherit the same PATH as your shell. To use a non-default bundle or model, set the arguments to acp --bundle docs/knowledge or acp --model provider/model. Janet must already have a selected model or receive one through that flag or JANET_MODEL.

The first ACP preview accepts text prompts, streams text and tool status, supports cancellation, and maps Janet's approval and question flows into ACP. Client-provided MCP servers and additional workspace roots are not bridged yet; Janet reports that limitation on stderr and remains scoped to the session project. stdout is reserved exclusively for ACP protocol messages.

Buzz currently exposes tool approvals in Janet's Activity panel rather than as channel controls. When Janet needs a question answered or an approval reviewed, she also posts a notice into the originating Buzz thread. Reply to a question in that thread; open Activity to approve or reject a tool request.

Buzz's ACP cwd is its managed nest rather than an individual Git checkout. Janet therefore requires a target under REPOS/<project>/ before writing a bundle. For a new project, she asks you to create or open it in Buzz first, verifies the checkout, and then defaults the bundle to REPOS/<project>/knowledge/; she does not place bundles at the nest root.

Herdr

Janet includes zero-configuration lifecycle reporting for Herdr, the runtime for coding agents. Start Janet normally in a Herdr pane:

janet

When Herdr supplies a pane ID, Janet reports idle, working, and blocked as turns progress. It also reports the active Janet thread ID and project path, making the session visible to Herdr and available to resume with janet --thread <id>. No hook file or Janet-specific Herdr configuration is required. Reporting is best-effort and becomes a no-op outside Herdr, so it never affects a turn when Herdr is absent.

Repository documentation is conversational in this first test pass. Start Janet in the repository and ask:

Document this repository's architecture and developer workflows.

Janet reads source, tests, configuration, and approved read-only Git evidence in place. Writes inside the selected knowledge bundle proceed without interruption; a write anywhere else in the selected project requires your approval.

Use -C <directory> to select a project and --bundle <path> to select a bundle inside it. The bundle path may be relative to the selected project or an absolute path within it:

janet --bundle docs/project-kb init
janet -C /path/to/project --bundle docs/project-kb query "what do we know?"

Janet rejects bundle paths outside the selected project.

Add -p (or pipe/redirect output) for headless one-shot mode. Headless query and ordinary lint runs are read-only. Init, ingest, visualize, and lint --fix may edit the selected bundle. A headless write outside that bundle is declined because there is no interactive approval prompt. Shell commands and Git commits require explicit --allow-exec.

janet lint always starts with the deterministic, token-free OKF checker shipped in the package. With no model configured it stops after that check, making it useful as a CI gate:

janet -C ./my-project lint

For every command, exit status is 0 for success, 1 for a task or conformance failure, and 2 for invalid usage, configuration, or another operational failure.

Interactive commands

Command	Purpose
/models · /model [id]	Choose or switch the model
/providers	Show detected providers and their configuration variables
/login [anthropic|openai-codex] [browser|device]	Choose and sign in to a supported subscription
/logout · /auth	Manage authentication
/observability · /traces	Configure opt-in tracing and inspect local history
/compact	Compact the current conversation into observations
/clear	Start a new thread without deleting the old one
/cancel	Stop the active turn
/help · /quit	Show help or exit

Esc or Ctrl+C cancels an active turn. Press Ctrl+C twice to exit.

Models and authentication

Janet has no default provider. It discovers configured providers through Mastra's model router. The initial provider cohort includes OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI Studio, DeepSeek, Groq, Mistral, xAI, OpenRouter, Together AI, Fireworks AI, and Cerebras.

Vertex AI and Amazon Bedrock use dedicated cloud gateways. OpenAI and Anthropic also support ChatGPT/Codex and Claude Max subscription OAuth. An explicitly exported API key takes precedence over stored OAuth for that process.

Credentials, settings, threads, caches, and local traces use ~/.janet/. Project-local state lives under <project>/.janet/. On first beta.3 launch, Janet moves the old global ~/.agent-knowledge/ directory only when ~/.janet/ does not already exist. Inside a Git repository, Janet adds its project-local runtime directory to Git's private info/exclude file when necessary; it does not edit the repository's tracked .gitignore.

Memory

Janet uses Mastra Observational Memory by default. The Observer compresses older messages and noisy tool output into durable observations; the Reflector condenses those observations over longer sessions. Raw messages remain in local storage and can still be recalled.

Memory work stays on the provider you authenticated. Override the automatic choice with JANET_MEMORY_MODEL, or set JANET_OBSERVER_MODEL and JANET_REFLECTOR_MODEL separately.

Observability

Tracing is strictly off by default. /observability can enable metadata-only or full capture to local history, Phoenix, or another OTLP-compatible backend. Secrets come from the environment and are never written to Janet settings.

See OBSERVABILITY.md for the architecture, privacy model, configuration, and eval roadmap.

Local document tools

Janet reads PDFs through a dedicated TypeScript extractor. Small documents return page-delimited text; larger documents use cached Markdown artifacts read in bounded chunks. Raw PDF bytes never enter model history.

The public web reader validates every redirect, blocks private and metadata networks, does not execute page JavaScript, and returns readable Markdown through the same bounded artifact pattern. It needs no API key.

Agent Knowledge skills

Janet is built around the seven portable Agent Knowledge skills:

• kb
• kb-init
• kb-ingest
• kb-document
• kb-query
• kb-lint
• kb-visualize

Agent Knowledge owns their source, deterministic conformance checker, and graph generator. Janet pins @stjbrown/agent-knowledge-skills@0.3.2 at build time and copies those skills into its own package, so an installed Janet remains self-contained and works offline.

You can also install the skills directly into another compatible agent without installing Janet:

npx skills@latest add stjbrown/agent-knowledge

Development

corepack enable
pnpm install --frozen-lockfile
pnpm verify
pnpm pack:janet

sync:skills runs before build, test, and pack. It resolves the installed skills package, verifies the exact version and all seven skill directories, then regenerates the ignored root skills/ folder.

See TESTING.md for the prerelease test matrix.

License

MIT. Portions of Janet are adapted from MastraCode under Apache-2.0. The bundled Agent Knowledge material includes the OKF specification under Apache-2.0 and the yaml parser under ISC. See NOTICE.