HomeAgent/README_EN.md

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HomeAgent

中文: README.md

An Agent framework designed around separation of core domain and application domain. The kernel enforces a zero-IO policy — all external interaction (WebUI, QQ, CLI, file operations, web search, memos, etc.) is handled by the plugin layer; the kernel performs no direct IO operations.

Combined with a three-layer memory architecture (Context → Document → Graph), it maintains contextual coherence across long-running single-conversation sessions through tiered storage and automated archival.

homed (kernel, zero IO) ← PluginSDK → plugins (all IO capabilities)

Since v1.1.1 media reaches the plugin boundary: plugins and the model can both read and write images/audio in memory (InsertWithMedia, InjectInputMedia). Media lives in plain-text memory as a [<mime> <short digest>] <description> marker — the description is the searchable semantic memory, the digest is the key back to the bytes.

Since v1.0.0 external plugins are independent subprocesses, communicating with the kernel over stdio JSON-RPC (control plane) + a shared memory segment (data plane) + an event ring (notification plane). A plugin crash cannot take down the kernel and it restarts automatically; swapping plugin.bin gives true hot-reload.

Design Principles

Separation of Core Domain and Application Domain — The kernel's responsibilities are limited to LLM orchestration, memory management, and knowledge retrieval; all IO capabilities (message send/receive, file read/write, network requests, hardware interaction, etc.) are implemented by plugins. This separation defines domain boundaries at the Agent framework level, with distinct responsibility scopes for the kernel and plugins.

Three-Layer Memory Architecture — Manages information retention in long-running agents through a tiered storage strategy:

• Context Layer: Pretrained word embedding / TF-IDF fallback relevance-scored event window, protects last 10 entries, maintains topK context entries
• Document Layer: Temporary memory with automatic cold data sinking, also supports user-initiated submissions
• Graph Layer: SQLite graph database, persists entity relationships and semantic memory, supports distillation pipelines to extract triples from conversations

Input Scheduling: 2 classes + 4 interrupt levels — Input does not go straight to the LLM; it first enters the scheduler. Two classes (queued = pending work, interrupt = ranked L1–L4 by "how urgent") with preemption and frame saving (interrupt stack); same level never preempts same level. L4 belongs only to the kernel and kernel-level plugins (e.g. the WebUI stop button). See "Input Scheduler & Interrupt Mechanism" in assets/docs/en/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Resident sub-agents — The kernel can station lightweight-kernel child agents (their own scheduler and temp graph memory, sharing the channel registry) to run long or backlogged work in parallel. When the main agent stays busy, the kernel hands queued input to a temporary triage assistant: simple items are handled directly, items needing the main agent get an immediate "busy, please wait" — users no longer wait in silence. See docs/zh/resident-subagent-design.md.

Architecture Diagrams

1. Message Processing Sequence

sequenceDiagram
    participant U as User/Plugin
    participant IO as IOManager
    participant SCH as Input Scheduler
    participant EV as eventLoop
    participant CTX as RelevanceContext
    participant LLM as LLM+Tool Loop
    participant ST as StageHost
    participant MEM as Three-Layer Memory

    U->>IO: InjectInput(type, payload)
    IO->>SCH: inputCh
    rect lavender
        Note over SCH: 2 task classes + 4 interrupt levels (L1-L4)
        SCH->>SCH: same level never preempts -> ready/interrupt queue
        SCH->>SCH: higher level -> preempt (frame pushed to interrupt stack)
        SCH->>SCH: offload (main agent busy too long -> temporary triage assistant)
    end
    SCH->>EV: pick one task and run it
    rect lavender
        Note over EV: processTextInput
        EV->>ST: StageOnInput  Plugin can rewrite/short-circuit
        EV->>CTX: Prune(input,topK)  StaticEmbedder/TF-IDF cosine pruning
        CTX->>MEM: Low-score events archived to Document (original timestamp)
        EV->>CTX: Append(input)  CleanTemplateText→three-branch vector→5s write
    end
    rect lightgreen
        Note over EV,LLM: process()
        EV->>MEM: buildMemoryContext  Indexer recalls from Graph (vector+jieba→BFS depth=2)
        EV->>MEM: buildSystemPrompt  DocQuery summary+Graph memory index+Persona+Skills
        EV->>ST: StagePreAction  Plugin can pre-intercept
        loop Tool loop
            LLM->>LLM: safe point: interrupt eval / yield
            LLM->>LLM: LLM Chat
            LLM->>ST: StagePostAction  Plugin can modify/short-circuit
            alt No tool call
                LLM-->>EV: Returns response
            else
                loop Each tool
                    ST->>ST: StageBeforeToolcall  Plugin can reject
                    LLM->>LLM: executeToolCall
                    ST->>ST: StageAfterToolcall
                end
            end
        end
    end
    rect lightpink
        Note over EV: emitResponse
        CTX->>CTX: Append(response)
        ST->>ST: StageBeforeOutput  Plugin can rewrite
        EV-->>U: ResponseCh CLI sync
        EV-->>EV: Event bus WebUI SSE
        ST->>ST: StageAfterOutput  Read-only
        EV->>MEM: emitMemoryCandidate
    end

2. Stage Pipeline

flowchart LR
    S1[① on_input] --> S2[② pre_action]
    S2 --> S3[③ post_action]
    S3 --> Q{Has tool?}
    Q -->|Yes| S4[④ before_toolcall]
    S4 --> T[executeToolCall]
    T --> S5[⑤ after_toolcall]
    S5 --> S3
    Q -->|No| S6[⑥ before_output]
    S6 --> S7[⑦ after_output]
    style S1 fill:#e1f5fe
    style S3 fill:#fff3e0
    style S6 fill:#e8f5e9

3. Three-Layer Memory

flowchart TB
    subgraph C[① Context Working Window]
        RC[RelevanceContext]
        A[Append] -->|CleanTemplateText→three-branch vector| RC
        P[Prune StaticEmbedder/TF-IDF Cosine] -->|Low score original timestamp| D
        P -->|Keep| TL[timeline→chronological→system prompt]
    end
    subgraph D[② Document File Memory]
        DS[DocStore JSON+TF-IDF]
        Q1[Query summary auto-inject] -->|[Related Memory Docs]| SP
        Q2[doc_query LLM active recall] -->|Consume+delete source| DS
        Q2 -->|Original timestamp write to context| RC
        CD[FindColdDocs 72h] -->|docToTriples| G
    end
    subgraph G[③ Graph Database]
        DB[(SQLite)]
        IDX[Indexer vector+jieba→BFS depth=2] -->|[Memory Index]| SP
        MEM[memory_recall/commit/merge/purge/edit]
        SOC[person_query/set_trait]
    end
    subgraph H[④ Heartbeat Distillation]
        REORG -->|Step3 Cold docs| CD
        REORG -->|Step4 Bigram Jaccard| CONS[consolidation]
        PIPE[Pipeline regex] -->|Name/Address/Likes/Age/Job| DB
    end
    SP[System Prompt] -->|Sequential assembly| LLM
    LLM[LLM] -->|doc_query| Q2
    LLM -->|memory_recall| MEM

See assets/docs/en/ARCHITECTURE.md for details.

Web Mascot

Xiaozhai — HomeAgent Web Mascot

Quick Start

make build build-cli
./build/homed -data /tmp/ha

# Interactive mode
./build/waiter

# Or single message
echo "Hello, remember that I like coffee" | ./build/waiter

API keys are configured via WebUI http://localhost:8080 settings page, persisted in SQLite.

Code Structure

cmd/homed/          Daemon entry, assembles all subsystems
cmd/waiter/         CLI client (Unix socket)
internal/
├── agent/core/     Agent core: input scheduler (2 classes + 4 levels), event loop, LLM tool loop, 7-stage pipeline, residents
├── agent/api/      LLM Provider (Lua adapter layer: provider.go drives the vm)
├── memory/         Three-layer memory: Graph(SQLite) / Document(JSON+TF-IDF) / Text(JSONL) + StaticEmbedder(pretrained word embedding/TF-IDF fallback) + CleanTemplateText(de-template)
├── knowledge/      Knowledge base (filesystem + TF-IDF)
├── plugin/         Plugin registry + subprocess loader (stdio RPC + shared memory segment + event ring)
├── plugins/        18 built-in plugins (webui/cli/timer/cmd/mcp/files/cfgmgr/agentcli/healthcheck/pluginmgr/clawhubadapter/multimodal/remotedevice/ai_image/localuse/skillmgr/data, ...)
├── sdk/            PluginSDK (Tool/Stage/Event three channels)
├── config/         SQLite config center
├── events/         Event bus
└── internal/lua/adapters/   10 LLM protocol adapter scripts
External plugin development: see [homeagent-sdk](https://gitcode.com/JianFeeeee/homeagent-sdk) repo, use `hmapdev` toolchain, refer to Go and Lua examples in `example/`

Project Status

v1.3.x line (v1.3.1–v1.3.12, latest released) — resident sub-agents + input scheduler rework.

• Resident sub-agents: the kernel can station lightweight-kernel child agents (their own scheduler, their own temp graph memory, sharing the channel registry). The parent dispatches and collects work via resident_agents (list/create/send/inspect/compress/reclaim/destroy). An inputch can be assigned to a child, so input is routed to it before entering the kernel.
• Output channels addressable to a specific agent: the AllowedOutputs grant set (consistent across all three filter points) lets parent/child deliver to each other; device capabilities became output channels too (one device/<id> per device).
• Input scheduler: two task classes (queued/interrupt) + four interrupt levels (L1–L4)
  • preempt/suspend/resume/interrupt-stack; same level never preempts same level, with a starvation guard and preemption cooldown. L4 belongs only to the kernel and kernel-level plugins (e.g. the WebUI stop button).
• Lightweight kernel profile: a child's memory surface narrows to "conventional context
  • graph memory" (narrow interface; the main graph opens as a query_only handle, writes go to its own temp instance).
• Backlog timely feedback (later in the line): when the main agent is busy for a long time, the kernel hands queued input to a temporary triage assistant — simple items are handled directly, items needing the main agent get an immediate "busy, please wait", so users no longer wait 10+ minutes in silence.
• Fixed a batch of real defects: inbound inputch (child/<id>) registration leak on resident destruction, a child's round count always showing 0 (info() never filled it), an empty child-side childIO (output channels not inherited), device heartbeat pong missing Flush (dropping every 60s), and Lua plugin bridge alignment with SDK 1.3.0.

v1.2.0 — unified multimodal vector space, media promoted to first-class graph memory, and the whole data plane moved into shared memory.

• Model-neutral unified embedding space: the kernel no longer adapts to any specific model. It exposes only a public provider SPI (pkg/embedding: Modality / Input{Data,MIME} / Info{Dimension,Fingerprint,Modalities} + a name registry), with implementations under providers/*. Default: Chinese-CLIP ViT-B/16 — text and image land in the same space (512-dim, fingerprint cd2a495cf990, Apache-2.0; measured ~1.59GB peak on load, settling to ~0.89GB steady-state); qwen3vl is kept (2048-dim, ~9.4GB) for machines with headroom or future video. Text search still falls back to the existing word-vector / TF-IDF path — a CLIP dual tower's pure-text semantics are weaker than an MLLM-style embedder, a cost documented rather than hidden.
• Media are first-class nodes and edges in the graph DB: the "index images via generated text descriptions" stopgap, media_refs and media reference counting are removed. Memory blocks follow a single-layer invariant — Context → Document → Graph is a migration, not a copy, and not kept alive by references.
• The entire data plane goes through shared memory (tool-call frames, Cleaners, input/output lanes, media blocks, document and knowledge bodies); RPC carries only offset descriptors. RPC protocol is now 2: the fd3 layout changed and there is no rolling upgrade — kernel and all plugins must be rebuilt and installed together.
• Injections can declare InjectOptions{NoMemory, ContextPolicy} (defaults: still recorded, not pruned); pruning must be requested explicitly and goes through the plugin's registered Cleaner. SDK 1.2.0 is purely additive over 1.1.0.
• Release packages enable the ONNX space by default and bundle the model (754MB) plus ONNX Runtime (24MB) in the server/full packages; homed drops native Windows support in favour of WSL2; the jieba dictionary is embedded in the binary.
• Fixed three silent install-chain failures: initconfig was a no-op (CGO_ENABLED=0 stub) that printed credentials without writing any, fresh installs were misdetected as "already configured" so default seeding was skipped entirely (0 plugins installed), and the deb postinst looked for the unit in the wrong path so enable never ran.
• Licensed AGPL-3.0-only from this version on (network clause included; statically linked plugins must match — see License).

The historical entries below are kept verbatim to show the evolution; two mechanisms in them were removed in v1.2.0: text-description-based media indexing, and reference-counted media GC.

Two performance claims also need correcting (measured 2026-09-20): "crash-to-recovery under 1s" does not hold — restarts are linearly backed off, i.e. 1s / 2s / 3s (procRestartBackoff=1s × nth crash). Even the first restart waits 1s. And the 4th crash within a 5-minute window stops automatic restarts pending human intervention (procMaxRestarts=3, tested as n > 3). The backoff was already 1s when this claim was written (v1.0.0), so it never held. "RPC round-trip p50 24.1µs" is the right order of magnitude but does not match current measurements: BenchmarkToolInvoke on this machine gives inline/small 30.4µs, frame/small 51.5µs, inline/large 767µs, frame/large 398µs. The original text is left unedited rather than rewritten, so the history isn't falsified.

v1.1.1 — Multimodal reaches the plugin boundary. v1.1.0 gave the memory system binary multimedia nodes, but that path was open only to the kernel itself; this release opens it to plugins and the model. The public SDK gains media fields and three media injection methods (paired with SDK v1.1.0, shared by the whole 1.1.x line), and the kernel implements the four matching RPCs. The bridge layer had been silently dropping fields: Confidence/types/SentenceText handed in by a plugin were discarded, Doc kept only three fields, and Remove never released references (media stayed "referenced" forever, so GC could never reclaim it). processTextInput and processMediaInput were unified into a single processInput, which finally gives the media path the dedup, no_memory, channel Cleaner, interrupt semantics and correct EventRawInput it had always lacked. Three real defects fixed: user-sent images never appeared in the WebUI chat log (the media path published a map while the subscriber asserted a string), memory_commit's sentence_text had never been exposed to the model (though it is the mandatory link in the media binding chain), and two data races in PluginSDK (11 reported by -race; in production this showed up as sporadic nil-dereference crashes during plugin reload).

v1.1.0 — Memory system supports binary multimedia nodes. Content-addressed media store (CAS + SQLite metadata + on-disk blobs, Get always re-verifies the digest) wired through L0 (context events) / L2 (documents) / L3 (graph sentences), with reference-counted GC (referenced items are never deleted). The description text produced by the vision model is the durable semantic memory; the blob is only a cache that capacity GC may evict.

v1.0.0 — External plugins moved from C ABI shared libraries to subprocess + shared memory. The first release that no longer loads .so/.dll, and it is incompatible with 0.9.x (existing plugins must be rebuilt into plugin.bin with the new toolchain — called plugindev back then, now hmapdev — though business code needs zero changes). Eliminates 6 classes of defects that had caused production incidents: hot-reload silently failing (DF_1_NODELETE making dlclose a no-op), no crash isolation (a plugin panic took down homed), stage lost updates (35.8~36.8% loss under the copy model), uncancellable cgo timeouts (linear OS-thread leaks), output_send reporting false success (the model was told "sent" while the message never went out), and Windows capability degradation (only 3 stage fields visible, no write-back). Three communication planes: stdio JSON-RPC (control) + shared memory segment (data) + event ring (notification); the privilege gradient is now enforced by three explicit gates. RPC round-trip p50 24.1µs; crash-to-recovery under 1s.

v0.9.0 — C ABI v2: external plugin Stage callbacks can now write back (invoke_stage gained a result out-param; plugins may mutate RawMessage/LLMText/ToolResults etc. in OnInput/AfterToolcall/PostAction and have them synced to the core). ABI version now tracks core minor releases (v0.9.x → ABIVersion=2, version_min=1 keeps old plugins loadable). Also fixes the tool-loop zen-compat placeholder that wrongly fired on first-turn system context tail. The SDK ships an enhanced sanitizer example (bad-UTF-8 / U+FFFD / ANSI-escape scrub across the whole pipeline). This ABI retired with v1.0.0.

v0.8.0 — Core is functional, plugin system enhanced. 20+ built-in plugins. External plugin development via homeagent-sdk repo. Added input channel NoMemory/Cleaner, ChannelDef, plugin disable/enable system (CLI + WebUI), plugindev toolchain C ABI ChannelDef support.

Documentation

• Project Overview | 中文
• Technical Architecture | 中文
• Plugin Development Guide | 中文
• Lua Adapter | 中文
• Knowledge Base Demo

Downloads

Releases ship three variants:

Variant	Contents	For
full	homed + waiter + desktop GUI + systemd unit	Single-machine, everything
server	homed + waiter + systemd unit	Servers (no desktop environment)
client	waiter + desktop GUI	Connecting to a remote HomeAgent

• Linux: .deb (amd64/arm64), .rpm (x86_64), .tar.gz
• Windows: HomeAgent_v1.2.0_{Full,Server,Client}_win64.exe (NSIS installer, includes the AGPL license page). Since v1.2.0 homed no longer supports native Windows (it relies on fd inheritance and in-segment offset dereferencing), so the installer bootstraps WSL2 and installs the Linux packages inside the distribution the same way a Linux host would.
• Portable: homeagent-bin-<os>_<arch>.tar.gz (homed/waiter/initconfig)
• Verification: SHA256SUMS

The macOS homed requires a native macOS build (CGO + sqlite3), so release packages ship only waiter/initconfig.

Build

make build build-cli    # Build daemon + CLI
make test               # go test ./...
make install            # Install to system

Dependencies: Go 1.25+, CGo (go-sqlite3), Linux.

homed requires Linux (it relies on fd inheritance and intra-segment offset dereferencing of the shared memory region; see cmd/homed/platform_windows.go). On Windows only waiter.exe is built and homed runs under WSL2 (see Downloads). macOS can build waiter/initconfig; homed must be built on native macOS.

License

This project is released under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPL-3.0-only) — see LICENSE.

This is the strongest copyleft in the GPL family: besides shipping the complete corresponding source when you distribute the software, you must also offer the source to users who interact with it over a network (§13, Remote Network Interaction). Anyone running a modified HomeAgent as a network service therefore has to make the modified source available to that service's users.

Plugins are statically linked against this project through the public SDK (the SDK source ends up inside the plugin binary), so plugins are derivative works and must be released under the same license. Process isolation does not change this — what is linked is the SDK code itself.

Third-party components shipped with the packages

Component	License	Location
Chinese-CLIP ViT-B/16 (ONNX artifacts)	Apache-2.0	/usr/lib/homeagent/models/chinese-clip-vit-b16-onnx/
ONNX Runtime (libonnxruntime.so)	MIT	/usr/lib/homeagent/onnxruntime/
jieba dictionary (embedded in the binary)	MIT	internal/memory/jiebadict/
Go dependencies (go-sqlite3, gojieba, bubbletea, …)	MIT / BSD-3 / Apache-2.0	permissive, AGPL-3.0-compatible

These components keep their own licenses and are not relicensed by this project. Full texts are shipped in /usr/share/doc/homeagent/licenses/, and the package metadata declares this package as AGPL-3.0-only.