Installation & Deployment

Autonomic AI is two components: agent-brain and agent-spine. Homebrew provides pre-built binaries for macOS (Apple Silicon). Building from source works on any platform Rust supports.

1. Homebrew (macOS, recommended)

brew tap autonomic-ai-dev/tap
brew install agent-brain agent-spine

Update both with:

brew upgrade agent-brain agent-spine

agent-spine update prints this command. It does not download releases itself.

2. Connect agent-brain to your editors

agent-brain install --global   # configure MCP and host hooks for supported editors
agent-brain doctor             # check the install

agent-brain doctor --fix repairs common problems it can detect. Restart your editor after installing so it picks up the new MCP server.

3. Set up agent-spine

agent-spine init

init creates agent-spine’s state directory under ~/.autonomic/state/spine and writes an example workflow.

4. Where settings and data live

Item	Location	Override
agent-brain settings (`config.yaml`)	`~/.autonomic/memory/`	`AGENT_BRAIN_HOME`
agent-brain database and route logs	`~/.autonomic/memory/`	`AGENT_BRAIN_HOME`
agent-spine state	`~/.autonomic/state/spine/`	none
agent-spine execution logs	`~/.autonomic/logs/spine/`	none

Everything stays on your machine unless you configure a NATS server or a remote model API.

5. Optional: NATS for agent-spine events

agent-spine publishes workflow events to NATS only if you set AUTONOMIC_NATS_URL. Credentials come from the environment:

export AUTONOMIC_NATS_URL=nats://127.0.0.1:4222
export AUTONOMIC_NATS_USER=...           # optional
export AUTONOMIC_NATS_PASSWORD=...       # optional
export AUTONOMIC_NATS_TLS=1              # optional; add AUTONOMIC_NATS_CA, _CERT, _KEY as needed
export AUTONOMIC_NATS_INSECURE=1         # optional; skips user and password

The credentials-file fallback from earlier releases has been removed.

6. Build from source

The repositories are private for now, so you need access to clone them.

git clone git@github.com:autonomic-ai-dev/agent-brain.git
cargo build --release --manifest-path agent-brain/agent-brain/Cargo.toml --bin agent-brain

git clone git@github.com:autonomic-ai-dev/agent-spine.git
cargo build --release --manifest-path agent-spine/agent-spine/Cargo.toml

Copy the resulting binaries from target/release/ into a directory on your PATH.