caliban-ai
caliban-ai is a small constellation of Rust projects for building agent systems:
- caliban — a Rust-native, provider-agnostic agent harness.
- prospero — orchestration layer.
- gonzalo — robust, shareable persistence layer for caliban.
See Development Updates for board-review progress reports.
caliban
A Rust-native, provider-agnostic agent harness.
- Site: https://caliban-ai.github.io/caliban/
- Repo: https://github.com/caliban-ai/caliban
- Issues: https://github.com/caliban-ai/caliban/issues
- Board: https://github.com/orgs/caliban-ai/projects/1
The full user guide, architecture decisions, and API reference live on the project site.
prospero
Orchestration layer for caliban.
- Site: https://caliban-ai.github.io/prospero/
- Repo: https://github.com/caliban-ai/prospero
- Issues: https://github.com/caliban-ai/prospero/issues
- Board: https://github.com/orgs/caliban-ai/projects/1
The full guide, architecture decisions, and API reference live on the project site.
gonzalo
Robust, shareable persistence layer for caliban.
- Site: https://caliban-ai.github.io/gonzalo/
- Repo: https://github.com/caliban-ai/gonzalo
- Issues: https://github.com/caliban-ai/gonzalo/issues
- Board: https://github.com/orgs/caliban-ai/projects/1
The full guide, architecture decisions, and API reference live on the project site.
Development Updates
Progress reports drafted at each Kanban board review. Each post summarizes what landed since the previous review, plus current backlog shape.
Reviews
Newest posts also appear in the sidebar under Updates.
Board review — 2026-07-05
First review since the pipeline moved to archiving Done cards off the board. Counts below are distinct issues; the "landed" figure is a catch-up total since the 2026-06-15 review, so it reads as a milestone summary rather than a two-week diff. Per-repo detail now lives in each project's changelog (newly published to its site — see below).
Snapshot
- Open items tracked: 117
- Backlog: 115
- In progress: 2
- In review: 0
By project
| Project | Backlog | In progress | In review |
|---|---|---|---|
| caliban | 87 | 0 | 0 |
| caliban-operator | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| gonzalo | 12 | 1 | 0 |
| helm-charts | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| prospero | 15 | 1 | 0 |
Landed since last review (186 issues)
caliban shipped 0.5.0.
The headline release turns caliban from a single-process CLI into the base of a
distributed, self-hostable agent supervisor: caliband gains a networked
control plane (gRPC/TLS transport, workspace-scoped multi-repo supervision),
config/data relocate to XDG-first locations, caliban consumes gonzalo's
code-graph over MCP, and a broad reliability + OAuth + security-hardening pass
lands (compaction correctness, model-router circuit breakers, permission/sandbox
fencing, atomic file writes). See the changelog for the full list and the
upgrade notes.
Kubernetes deployment (epic caliban#274) came together end to end. Two new
repos were stood up — caliban-operator (kube-rs operator + CalibanTask CRD,
reconciling to agent-sandbox) and helm-charts (umbrella chart with a live
k3s integration gate). Multi-arch, non-root container images now publish to
GHCR for caliban, gonzalo, and prospero, all built on native arm64 runners
(QEMU dropped).
gonzalo advanced the code-graph capability and its HA service. Language
breadth landed across Python, JS/TS, Go, Java, C#, and C/C++ grammars behind a
crash-isolated parser pool; a persistent SQLite GraphStore backs path-agnostic
slices, impact queries, and graph diffing, exposed over gRPC/HTTP and the
gonzalo-mcp server. The storage foundation (content-addressed slice store,
manifest sync, mark-sweep GC, incremental git-diff sync) and the gonzalod
service (health/readiness probes, fs|s3 substrate selection) shipped alongside
its 0.1.0 container image.
prospero reached its first release. The control plane gained a
FleetProvider seam with Local and K8sFleet backends (CRUD + watch over
CalibanTask), workspace-scoped caliband discovery, and a network transport
dialing caliband over TCP+TLS — plus a sweep of clustered-mode correctness fixes
(failover, cross-replica registry propagation, per-stream sequencing, event
de-duplication). Published as
0.1.0 with its own
container image and Helm chart.
Docs pipeline: each project now publishes its CHANGELOG.md to its Pages
site, and this board-review generator was reworked to source "what landed" from
closed issues (archiving-proof) rather than the board's Done column.
Backlog by kind
- kind/bug: 1
- kind/cleanup: 11
- kind/design: 3
- kind/documentation: 8
- kind/epic: 16
- kind/feature: 54
- kind/flake: 1
Progress since the board was established
The caliban-ai Kanban board (Project #1) launched 2026-06-06. This inaugural development update summarizes completed work across caliban, prospero, and gonzalo. Auto-drafted from the board, then edited; counts below reflect distinct issues — each issue's implementing PRs are tracked separately on the board and omitted here to avoid double-counting.
Snapshot (issues)
- Issues tracked: 129
- Completed: 41
- Backlog: 88
By project (issues)
| Project | Completed | Backlog |
|---|---|---|
| caliban | 30 | 60 |
| gonzalo | 5 | 12 |
| prospero | 6 | 16 |
Completed work
caliban
- #8
/tui: fullscreen alternate-screen toggle (kind/feature) - #13 Flip eligible slash commands to immediate:true (kind/cleanup)
- #26 Add
--debug-fileflag (kind/feature) - #27
--verboseheadless flag for full tool I/O (—) - #41 Fix flaky hooks_shell.rs stdout-drain race (kind/bug)
- #55 Permission "always allow" at project/user/local scope does not apply to the live session (re-prompts until restart) (kind/bug)
- #56 Loaded skills are never proactively invoked — model improvises instead of using a matching skill (kind/feature)
- #58 Permission Ask modal (and always-allow sub-prompt) clip the action row when input/pattern are long — Deny option hidden (kind/bug)
- #60 Ollama: detect real context window from /api/ps (context_length) instead of a static 32K fallback (kind/feature)
- #65 Set up test coverage tracking (local + CI) with a minimum-coverage gate (kind/feature)
- #68 Raise test coverage to 85% and bump the COVERAGE_MIN gate (kind/cleanup)
- #69 Flaky: caliban-images strict_routing_* tests race on CALIBAN_STRICT_ROUTING env var (kind/bug)
- #71 caliband daemon Spawn registers agents but never launches a worker (agents stuck in Spawning) (kind/bug)
- #75 Background sub-agent workers run unguarded — apply tool_allowlist + permission policy (kind/feature)
- #76 Rm --force on a Running agent orphans the worker process (should SIGTERM) (kind/bug)
- #77 Per-agent socket file is left on disk after Kill/Rm/worker-exit (kind/cleanup)
- #78 Derive Serialize on TurnEvent for full-fidelity worker event stream (kind/feature)
- #79 Live attach protocol: history replay + live TurnEvent streaming + inbound messages + agents attach client (kind/feature)
- #81 Inbound user messages to a running sub-agent (idle/await-input) — needs agent-core support + ADR 0037 amendment (kind/feature)
- #84 Serialize parent hook config into SpawnSpec for inherit_hooks=true (full hook inheritance) (kind/feature)
- #88 Flaky test: caliban-images strict_routing_default_is_strict races on CALIBAN_STRICT_ROUTING env var (kind/flake)
- #93 Daemon-spawned workers can't select a provider (SpawnSpec has no provider; CALIBAN_PROVIDER ignored) (kind/feature)
- #97 docs: remove resolved ADR conformance audit + make ADR citations self-sustaining (kind/documentation)
- #100 feat(model-router): user-facing extended-thinking toggle independent of effort (kind/feature)
- #106 feat(tools): SessionStart context-injection hook surface (kind/feature)
- #107 fix(tools): warn instead of silently skipping skills whose name mismatches their directory (kind/bug)
- #109 design(labels): agree a shared label taxonomy across caliban/gonzalo/prospero (kind/design)
- #112 fix(slash-commands): /memory delete should not be immediate (silent, unconfirmed data loss) (kind/bug)
- #121 feat(hooks): execute config-defined [[hooks.*]] handlers at runtime (kind/feature)
- #125 docs(adr): adopt docs/adr/ convention to match prospero + gonzalo (kind/cleanup)
gonzalo
- #3 Structured-body merge (currently returns NeedsResolution) (kind/feature)
- #15 design: ticket-system capability layer over Record/Store core (kind/design)
- #16 design: knowledge-store capability over vector + domain layers (kind/design)
- #20 test(ticket): TicketSource conformance suite keyed on policy variants (kind/feature)
- #19 feat(ticket): provider connectors (GitHub, Jira, Linear, GitLab, Asana) (kind/feature)
prospero
- #12 Set up test coverage tracking (local + CI) with a minimum-coverage gate (kind/feature)
- #13 Raise test coverage to 85% and bump the coverage gate (kind/cleanup)
- #19 docs(adr): adopt ADR practice under docs/adr/####-topic.md (kind/documentation)
- #28 fix(api): SSE silently drops lagged events with no gap signal to the client (kind/bug)
- #27 feat(cli): expose --tool-allowlist on spawn (kind/feature)
- #30 docs(adr): convert ADRs from Nygard to MADR-lite for sibling parity (kind/cleanup)
Backlog by kind
- kind/bug: 8
- kind/cleanup: 9
- kind/epic: 10
- kind/feature: 42