Botholomew

Autonomous

Background workers claim tasks, work them with Claude, and log every interaction. Spawn one-shot workers, a long-running --persist worker, or point cron at `botholomew worker run`.

Portable

A project is a directory of files — markdown for prompts, tasks, and schedules; CSVs for conversation history. Copy it, share it, `git diff` it, check it in, or `.gitignore` it.

Your data, your disk

Tasks, schedules, threads, prompts, and skills are all real files you can `vim`, `grep`, and `git`. The knowledge store is a single local DuckDB file managed by [membot](https://github.com/evantahler/membot) — append-only, versioned, queryable.

Extensible

External tools come from MCP servers via MCPX — run them locally (Gmail, Slack, GitHub) or connect through a gateway like Arcade.dev to reach hundreds of authenticated services.

Safe by default

The agent has no shell and no direct filesystem access. The knowledge store is addressed by `logical_path` (a DB key, not a filesystem path); the remaining file-system paths the agent touches (tasks, schedules, prompts, skills) all route through one sandbox helper (NFC normalization + lstat-walk to reject symlinks).

Concurrent

Many workers can run at once. Each writes a pidfile and heartbeats; tasks and schedules are claimed via `O_EXCL` lockfiles, and crashed workers get reaped automatically.

Self-modifying

The agent maintains its own `beliefs.md` and `goals.md` — it learns, updates its priors, and revises its goals as it works. It can also author its own slash-command skills mid-conversation.

Why Botholomew?

Botholomew has no shell and no access to your real filesystem. The agent's world is a per-project knowledge store managed by membot — every read, write, search, and delete is addressed by logical_path (a DB key, not a filesystem path), so a prompt-injected attempt to reach ~/.ssh/id_rsa has nowhere to land. Local files and URLs are brought in through botholomew membot add. External capabilities (email, Slack, the web, and hundreds of other services) are granted deliberately, per project, through MCP servers wired up via MCPX.

Quickstart

bash

# 1. Install (requires Bun 1.1+)
bun install -g botholomew

# 2. Initialize a project
botholomew init

# 3. Set your Anthropic API key (embeddings run locally — no other key needed)
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

# 4. Queue some work and run a worker
botholomew task add "Summarize every markdown file in ~/notes"
botholomew worker run

# 5. Or chat with the agent interactively
botholomew chat

See Get started for the full walkthrough, then dive into Architecture to understand the moving parts.

For LLMs and AI agents

This site is published in LLM-friendly formats too:

/llms.txt — table of contents with links to every documentation page
/llms-full.txt — the entire doc set bundled into one file
Append .md to any page URL (e.g. /architecture.md) to get the raw markdown source

Point your agent at one of these instead of scraping HTML.

BotholomewAn AI agent for knowledge work.