ariel

Ariel is the chat bridge for the Caliban agent fleet. It brings fleet notifications, commands, approvals, and conversation into the chat platforms where teams already work: Discord first, then Slack and Microsoft Teams.

In The Tempest, Ariel is the spirit Prospero sends to carry messages. Here it carries them between people in chat and the fleet that Prospero runs.

Where it stands

Ariel is pre-1.0. The current release is v0.3.0, published as the container image ghcr.io/caliban-ai/ariel:0.3.0 for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. It is a running bridge on Discord:

• arield watches prosperod's fleet and keeps one live message per agent in every chat channel configured to follow that agent's workspace, editing it in place as the agent changes, collapsing bursts into a summary and pacing sends against the platform's own budget — and, for an agent started from chat, naming the person who asked for it (Who started an agent);
• it answers eight /ariel commands — link, status, spawn, kill, respawn, channel, configure and invite — each authorized on the lower of the person's role and the channel's ceiling, each mutating one audited in gonzalo (Chat Commands);
• identity, role grants, channel configuration, link tokens and the audit trail are gonzalo records; Ariel stores nothing of its own;
• channel configuration is re-read while the daemon runs, so adding or retiring a channel needs no restart;
• the ariel CLI configures channels and mints link tokens (The ariel CLI).

Not built: the approvals layer and conversational threads are designed and deferred, and the Slack and Teams backends are not written. See Status & Roadmap for exactly what is built, what is next, and what is blocked.

Reading this guide

• Architecture & Couplings: how Ariel sits beside prospero and gonzalo, and how the crates divide the work.
• Status & Roadmap: what is built, next, deferred and blocked.
• Getting Started: build, test, and run arield from source or from the published image.
• Configuration: every setting arield reads.
• The ariel CLI: channel configuration and link tokens.
• Chat Commands: the /ariel commands and who may run them.
• Discord Setup: create a bot, register the commands, and run the manual smoke test.
• Changelog: what changed in each release.
• Architecture Decisions: the reasoning behind the design.