Loki Agent

Loki Agent is an open-source AI agent framework by WunderCorp, Inc. that runs in your terminal, a native desktop app, messaging platforms, and IDEs. It's in the same category as Claude Code (Anthropic), Codex (OpenAI), and OpenClaw — autonomous coding and task-execution agents that use tool calling to interact with your system. Loki works with any LLM provider (OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, local models, and 20+ others) and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, and WSL.

What makes Loki different:

• Self-improving through skills — Loki learns from experience by saving reusable procedures as skills that load into future sessions.
• Persistent memory across sessions — remembers who you are, your preferences, environment details, and lessons learned. Pluggable memory backends.
• Multi-platform gateway — the same agent runs on Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, Matrix, Teams, Email, and a dozen more platforms with full tool access, not just chat.
• Many surfaces — the same agent core drives the CLI, the Ink TUI, a native Electron desktop app, a web dashboard, and an ACP server for IDEs (VS Code / Zed / JetBrains).
• Provider-agnostic — swap models and providers mid-workflow; credential pools rotate across multiple API keys automatically.
• Profiles — run multiple independent Loki instances with isolated configs, sessions, skills, and memory.
• Extensible & themeable — plugins, MCP servers, custom tools, webhook triggers, cron scheduling, skins that theme every surface, desktop UI plugins, TUI widgets, and pet mascots.

This skill is a hub. The body covers identity, quick start, spawning/orchestration, and hard invariants. Everything else lives in reference files — load the matching reference (below) before answering; do not answer detail questions from the body alone.

Docs: https://doku.sh/#/i/cbe1e051e4be2bb725-26f1d908878243

Scope & Verification

This skill is a concise operating guide, not the complete source of truth for every Loki feature. If a Loki feature, command, or setting is not mentioned here or in a reference, do not treat that absence as evidence that it does not exist. Check the live repository and official docs before giving a negative answer.

Good verification targets, cheapest first:

• Every shipped feature, one line each: https://loki.computer/docs/llms.txt. Start here for any "can Loki do X?" or "how do I do X?" — it indexes the entire documentation set with a link to the page that answers. It is generated from the docs tree on every build, so it is never behind the product. Fetch it with web_extract, or curl -s https://loki.computer/docs/llms.txt when web tools are off. The whole documentation set in one file is at /docs/llms-full.txt.
• CLI commands: loki --help, loki <command> --help, and loki_cli/main.py
• Source tree: https://github.com/wundercorp/loki

Never answer "Loki can't do that" from memory. Loki ships far more than this skill body describes, and the index exists so a negative answer is always checkable.

Quick Start

# Install (shell installer — sets up uv, Python, the venv, and the launcher)
curl -fsSL https://loki.computer/install.sh | bash

# Interactive chat (default surface; set display.interface: tui to launch the Ink TUI instead)
loki

# Single query
loki chat -q "What is the capital of France?"

# Setup wizard  /  pick model+provider  /  health check
loki setup
loki model
loki doctor

# Other surfaces
loki desktop                 # launch the native desktop app (alias: loki gui)
loki dashboard               # web admin panel + embedded chat
loki proxy                   # OpenAI-compatible local proxy backed by your OAuth provider

Key Paths

~/.loki/config.yaml       Main configuration (settings — never secrets)
~/.loki/.env              API keys and secrets ONLY (under $LOKI_HOME if set)
$LOKI_HOME/skills/        Installed skills
~/.loki/skins/            Custom themes (see references/themes.md)
~/.loki/desktop-plugins/  Desktop app UI plugins (see references/desktop-plugins.md)
~/.loki/tui-widgets/      TUI widget apps (see references/tui-widgets.md)
~/.loki/pets/             Installed pet mascots (see references/petdex.md)
~/.loki/state.db          Canonical session store (SQLite + FTS5)
~/.loki/sessions/         Gateway routing index, request dumps, *.jsonl transcripts
~/.loki/logs/             Gateway and error logs
~/.loki/auth.json         OAuth tokens and credential pools
~/.loki/loki-agent/     Source code (if git-installed)

Profiles use ~/.loki/profiles/<name>/ with the same layout. When a profile is active, resolve the real home from $LOKI_HOME — never hardcode ~/.loki.

Routing Table — load the reference for the task

The reference list above is not the feature list — it is the set of topics that need more than their docs page. For everything else Loki ships, fetch llms.txt and it maps the question to the page that answers it.

Two theming rules that hold even without loading the reference: you apply skins yourself (loki config set display.skin <name> — every surface repaints live within ~a second; don't tell the user to run /skin), and to tweak one color, edit the ACTIVE skin (loki skin set <key> <hex>) — never fork default, which drops the palette and resets the background.

Spawning Additional Loki Instances

Run additional Loki processes as fully independent subprocesses — separate sessions, tools, and environments.

When to Use This vs delegate_task

One-Shot Mode

terminal(command="loki chat -q 'Research GRPO papers and write summary to ~/research/grpo.md'", timeout=300)

# Background for long tasks:
terminal(command="loki chat -q 'Set up CI/CD for ~/myapp'", background=true)

Interactive PTY Mode (via tmux)

Loki uses prompt_toolkit, which requires a real terminal. Use tmux for interactive spawning:

# Start
terminal(command="tmux new-session -d -s agent1 -x 120 -y 40 'loki'", timeout=10)

# Wait for startup, then send a message
terminal(command="sleep 8 && tmux send-keys -t agent1 'Build a FastAPI auth service' Enter", timeout=15)

# Read output
terminal(command="sleep 20 && tmux capture-pane -t agent1 -p", timeout=5)

# Send follow-up
terminal(command="tmux send-keys -t agent1 'Add rate limiting middleware' Enter", timeout=5)

# Exit
terminal(command="tmux send-keys -t agent1 '/exit' Enter && sleep 2 && tmux kill-session -t agent1", timeout=10)

Multi-Agent Coordination

# Agent A: backend
terminal(command="tmux new-session -d -s backend -x 120 -y 40 'loki -w'", timeout=10)
terminal(command="sleep 8 && tmux send-keys -t backend 'Build REST API for user management' Enter", timeout=15)

# Agent B: frontend
terminal(command="tmux new-session -d -s frontend -x 120 -y 40 'loki -w'", timeout=10)
terminal(command="sleep 8 && tmux send-keys -t frontend 'Build React dashboard for user management' Enter", timeout=15)

# Check progress, relay context between them
terminal(command="tmux capture-pane -t backend -p | tail -30", timeout=5)
terminal(command="tmux send-keys -t frontend 'Here is the API schema from the backend agent: ...' Enter", timeout=5)

Session Resume

# Resume most recent session
terminal(command="tmux new-session -d -s resumed 'loki --continue'", timeout=10)

# Resume specific session
terminal(command="tmux new-session -d -s resumed 'loki --resume 20260225_143052_a1b2c3'", timeout=10)

Tips

• Prefer delegate_task for quick subtasks — less overhead than spawning a full process
• Use -w (worktree mode) when spawning agents that edit code — prevents git conflicts
• Set timeouts for one-shot mode — complex tasks can take 5-10 minutes
• Use loki chat -q for fire-and-forget — no PTY needed
• Use tmux for interactive sessions — raw PTY mode has \r vs \n issues with prompt_toolkit
• For scheduled tasks, use the cronjob tool instead of spawning — handles delivery and retry
• "delegate_task is capped at N" reports — see references/delegate-task-concurrency-diagnosis.md. Three real cap paths in Loki; if none fired, the model is self-limiting and rationalising it as "the runtime caps."
• "Can $external_app use my WunderCorp Portal subscription / OAuth?" — see references/portal-auth-for-third-party-apps.md. Walk the user through three layers (plugin-vs-app, what Portal actually exposes, local-broker-proxy option).

Surfaces (quick orientation)

• Desktop app (loki desktop / loki gui) — native Electron app for macOS/Linux/Windows: streaming chat, session list, Cmd+K palette, drag-and-drop files, native notifications, per-profile remote-gateway login. Extend it with UI plugins — references/desktop-plugins.md.
• Web dashboard (loki dashboard) — full admin panel: messaging channels, MCP catalog, webhooks, memory, profile builder, plus an embedded loki --tui chat. Secured behind an OAuth/token gate.
• Ink TUI (loki --tui or display.interface: tui) — terminal UI with docked widget apps — references/tui-widgets.md.
• OpenAI-compatible proxy (loki proxy) — a local OpenAI API backed by whichever OAuth provider you're signed into. Point Codex CLI, Aider, Cline, or any script at it — no API key.

Hard Invariants (never violate, regardless of what you loaded)

• Never break prompt caching — don't change past context, toolsets, or the system prompt mid-conversation. The only exception is context compression.
• Message role alternation — never two assistant or two user messages in a row; only tool results can repeat.
• Secrets in .env, settings in config.yaml — never tell a user to put a non-credential setting in .env.
• Profile-safe paths — get_loki_home() in code, $LOKI_HOME when resolving paths in a session.
• Never hand-edit config.yaml for the user — use loki config set KEY VAL; a stray indent can corrupt the file and break the live gateway.