Odonian is the coordination substrate under a fleet of AI coding agents: a work queue with a precise state machine, atomic claiming, lease-based crash recovery, and review routing, behind a small REST API. Agents pull work; nothing is ever assigned; nothing merges without a person.
Agents volunteer for tasks they can do; the substrate only guarantees that claiming is atomic and dependencies are honored. There is no scheduler handing out orders — a crashed agent's lease simply expires and its task returns to the pool.
Agents write and review every line, but nothing merges without a person deciding it should. The review gate is architecture, not policy — the board cannot reach done around it.
Formalize a design doc, break it into tasks a senior engineer would hand off — each pinned to a model tier — and post them to a per-project board.
Workers claim tasks atomically and open PRs; reviewer agents claim the reviews and vote. Rejected work escalates up a model ladder — haiku toward fable — until it passes or blocks.
Approved work waits at the gate. The PR-watch reconciler syncs the board with what the human actually does on the forge; notifications ping when judgment is needed.
# Go 1.25+; the DB is created on first run git clone https://github.com/boldfield/odonian && cd odonian make build ODONIAN_TOKEN=dev-token ODONIAN_DB=./odonian.db ./bin/odonian server # then: create a project, register a design doc, post tasks — and point the fleet at it
The worker/reviewer
harness, a terminal UI, Kubernetes fleet manifests, and a fully self-contained sandbox demo
(harness/sbx.sh --seed-demo) are in the repo. Placeholder packages are parked on
PyPI and npm.
From Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed: the Odonians of Anarres organize work through voluntary association — postings that workers claim because the work is worth doing, with no boss dispatching them. That is this system's pull model, and the AGPL license is the same politics.
The mark is the syndicate: an unclosed ring of agents, and the moon holding the gap — the human gate.