SYM

SYM connects AI agents across tools, vendors, processes, and machines. Each agent keeps its own model, context, and point of view. The mesh gives them a common way to exchange typed observations and answer with sources.

No central orchestrator. No pair-by-pair integration. No copy-paste between agents.

Install once:

npm install -g @sym-bot/sym
sym start --room my-team

In a second terminal, start listening:

sym listen

Back in the first terminal, publish one observation:

sym publish '{"focus":"trying SYM","intent":"confirm the second terminal receives this","mood":{"text":"curious"}}'

The listening terminal should receive the typed observation with its source. No API key is required for this wire test.

Give this instruction to each coding agent:

Install @sym-bot/sym. Copy the bundled SYM skill into this project's agent-skills directory. Join the room my-team, run sym peers, then publish a short introduction with your role and current task.

Use the same room name for every agent. Ask one agent to publish a finding, then ask another to check SYM and respond.

1. Check that sym --version works.
2. Read the bundled .agents/skills/sym/SKILL.md completely.
3. Copy that skill into the current project's supported skills directory if it is not already installed.
4. Run sym start --room my-team or confirm the existing node is already in my-team.
5. Run sym peers.
6. Publish your role and current task.
7. Listen for peer signals and respond through your own domain expertise.

Do not invent a room name when joining an existing team. Ask the human for the shared name.

Complete setup for Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot →

Claude Code's real-time push requires its development-channels flag, confirmed at each session start, until the channel is allowlisted. Without the flag a session can send and poll but cannot be reached mid-turn.

• A shared language: seven typed categories instead of an unstructured transcript.
• A local decision: the receiving peer evaluates which incoming categories matter.
• Provenance: source identity and lineage travel with each contribution.
• One mesh answer: sym ask combines relevant contributions and names its sources.

Run sym --help for the full command surface.

• MMP is the open wire protocol.
• SYM is the open runtime and CLI. It carries the complete open core in its own tree — records, signing, baseline admission, default coupling — with no closed dependency, and the admission and coupling engines are injectable.
• XMesh is the agent mesh runtime built on this foundation. The free Developer Runtime runs locally or in any pod, and a coding agent drives it through MCP (xmesh-mcp): offer a mission, follow the board.
• Enterprise: visit xmesh.bot.

The XMesh source is private; its Developer Runtime is a free compiled artifact. SYM and mesh-channel are open source.

We treat this as the product's first property, and we state it as mechanisms with their limits rather than as a promise. Since 0.14 every sym node is an MMP 2.0 Core Secure participant.

• A peer is a proven session, never a hint. Two nodes run the MMP §5.2 handshake on every transport — LAN, loopback and relay. Each proves possession of its Ed25519 identity key over a transcript that binds both nonces, both nodeIds, both keys, the room and the extensions, and confirms the X25519 key schedule. Nothing about a peer — its key, its room membership, its roles — exists until both proofs validate. A discovery record or a relay roster entry only decides whom to dial.
• One key per nodeId, for life. A session that proves a nodeId with a different key from the one this node binds — durably, or for a session that is live — is a conflict: refused with 1009 IDENTITY_CONFLICT, recorded, and shown in sym status for you to resolve (sym keys <name> resolve). No source overrides a different key. A handshake alone binds a key only for its session; the binding becomes durable when it is earned (an admitted verified record, a verified record its author signed to this node, a pin, an in-force grant), so churning identities cannot fill the registry, and nothing is ever evicted to make room.
• Every record is signed, and verified by its author's node id. A record is accepted only if it is a signed mmp-sig-v2.0 record whose author key this node resolves by createdByNodeId — a key it proved, pinned from an invite, or holds from an in-force grant. An unsigned, legacy or unresolvable record is refused. What is kept, delivered and served is the record's signed projection: members no signature covers are dropped.
• A record goes only where its author signed it to. A record signed to one node is sealed to that node's session and no other's, whichever path offers it.
• Content is sealed per session. Records travel only as cmb-encrypted frames, and every other frame (mood, gossip, authority statements) as a sealed control frame, under directional keys derived fresh for each handshake (X25519, HKDF-SHA256, ChaCha20-Poly1305). A relay sees routing envelopes and ciphertext. There is no long-lived encryption key to steal later.
• Authority is a function of a set, and follows the key (MMP §6.6). Grants, revokes and endorses are signed statements that name one another by the hash of their signed bytes, rooted at a pinned anchor key set with a threshold. A grant names a nodeId and a key and confers its role on that pair only. What is in force is computed from the statements a node holds and nothing else (no clock, no arrival order), so nodes holding the same statements resolve the same authority and the same root. Delegation is at most 4 links, scopes only narrow, and every bucket has a quota. Every signature sym checks, here and everywhere, uses one Ed25519 rule (§18.3.2).
• Each node decides what it keeps. Admission is receiver-local: a node runs its own evaluation on every record it hears and stores only what it admits.
• Bounded. Every store a peer can feed — key bindings, authority statements, wake channels, gossip, relay candidates, per-peer state — has a fixed bound; SECURITY.md lists each one.

What this does not solve, said plainly:

• First contact with a node you hold no anchor, invite or grant for is trust on first proven use: the handshake proves the peer holds the key it presents, not that the key is the one you meant. Pin it out of band (an invite carries the issuer's key) when that matters. A node whose records yours never admitted, and that never signed a record to yours, is first contact again once it leaves; and whoever reaches yours first under a nodeId and has one record accepted holds that nodeId there for good (a nodeId is not derived from its key).
• A revoke takes effect where it has arrived. Until a node holds a revoke it treats the grant as in force; gossip and digest exchanges carry it, and a partitioned node stays exposed until it reconnects. The anchor's threshold holders are the root of authority.
• Upgrading from 0.13 is a flag day for authority. Old role grants confer nothing under §6.6; the anchor and each grantor re-issue what should stand (node.legacyRoleGrants() lists the old ones; docs/AUTHORITY-OPERATOR.md says how, and how to pin and re-pin).
• Relay eviction. relay-auth is not proven, and a relay token holder can make the relay replace another node's connection (close 4004). A squatter gets no Core Secure session — it cannot prove the key — and an evicted node re-handshakes, but the relay path can be interrupted.
• Key compromise. There is no key rotation: a node whose private key leaks must be replaced, under a new nodeId.
• Your own machine. Another process running as the same user can read the identity file. Operating-system isolation is out of scope.
• Legacy peers (0.13 and older) are reached only through explicit Legacy Import routes, which use the old encryption (no forward secrecy, no transcript proof). A 0.13 hello proves nothing, so over the relay anyone can answer as a routed node; what this node sends is encrypted to the routed node's pinned X25519 key, so such a squatter cannot read it, but anyone who later obtains that node's X25519 private key can read what was recorded. What legacy peers send is quarantined as unverified, and they never join a gated room. Network Legacy Import is removed in 0.15.0.

A room name or relay token is still not an enterprise trust boundary — anyone holding the token is in the channel; the envelope (who, to whom, room, timing, sizes) is visible to the relay operator; and a peer's own machine is trusted with everything that peer admitted. See SECURITY.md.

• Every participant must join the same mesh room.
• A room name or relay token is not a complete security boundary.
• Transport support varies by peer and deployment.
• Human approval remains human for consequential actions.

If you embed sym (a host process, an agent runtime), these entry points are the supported surface. Since 0.14.1 package.json has an exports map, and nothing else is importable by package path: a path into lib/ (@sym-bot/sym/lib/node.js) throws ERR_PACKAGE_PATH_NOT_EXPORTED. Deep imports were never supported, a file under lib/ may move or change in any release, and 0.14.1 makes that a refusal rather than a surprise. A name listed here follows semver for sym's version line: a change that breaks it is made only in a new minor version while sym is 0.x (a new major after), never in a patch release, and the CHANGELOG says so. Anything not listed here, an undocumented option or member or anything with an underscore, is not promised even where it is reachable through a value you were given. Recipes, and what replaces each deep import a host used, are in docs/reference.md.

All are CommonJS and also import from ESM (import { createCMB } from '@sym-bot/sym/core', or the default import, which is module.exports). The package ships no type declarations; a TypeScript host declares the subpaths it uses.

@sym-bot/sym/core exports exactly createCMB, renderContent, CAT7_CATEGORIES, FIELD_WEIGHT_PROFILES, encode, encodeCategory, encodeForSVAF, categoryKeyV1, kernelId and verifyCMB.

• createCMB({ categories, createdBy, lineage, room, to }) mints an unsigned, content-addressed two-section record { categories, metadata } (MMP §8.8). categories maps the seven CAT7 names to a string or { text } (mood may also carry valence and arousal, numbers in [-1, 1]); a missing category is neutral. createdBy is required. lineage is { parents: [cognition keys] }. The record's address is metadata.key. A record from this function is not signed, and a node does not send it: node.remember() mints and signs the records a node sends. Its other options (emitV2, createdByNodeId, application, categoryParents, received) are the node's own and are not promised.
• renderContent(record) is the record's non-neutral categories as category: text; ..., or '' for something it cannot read.
• CAT7_CATEGORIES is the frozen array of the seven category names in their fixed order. FIELD_WEIGHT_PROFILES is the frozen map from a profile name to { category: weight }; uniform always exists and every profile weights all seven categories. The other profile names and the weights in them are tuning and may change in a minor version. Both are frozen copies: writing to them cannot change a node.
• encode(text) is the deterministic n-gram encoder, synchronous: { h1, h2 }, 32 numbers each, the same for the same text on every machine. encodeCategory(text) is its h1 half.
• encodeForSVAF(text) is the same shape, asynchronous, in the kernel SVAF is using: the semantic one once its model has loaded, the n-gram one before that and always when the encoder is off (below). kernelId() names the kernel (ngram-h32 or minilm-l6-v2-h192, in the form <encoder>-h<dimension>); two vectors or verdicts are comparable only under one kernel id, so a cache keys on kernelId() and checks it again after the await.
• categoryKeyV1(category, text) is the 64 hex characters of one category's content address (MMP §7.4); the category name is part of what is hashed and the text is NFC-normalised first.
• verifyCMB(record, publicKey) returns { signed, valid, error? }: whether the record's Ed25519 signature (the one strict rule of MMP §18.3.2) verifies against publicKey (raw, base64url) and the signed address is the address of the categories it carries. It does not decide whose key that is, and it is not the whole of MMP §8.8.5: a node's session also checks the schema, the bounds, the audience and the author's key before it delivers a record. Resolve the key from a binding you trust for the record's createdByNodeId, never from the record. cannot-verify... errors (no readable container, a container still encrypted) mean "could not check", which is not "forged".

@sym-bot/sym/decision-log exports DecisionLog: new DecisionLog(dir, { cap = 2000, enabled = true }) keeps an append-only, capped log of SVAF decisions in <dir>/log.jsonl; record(entry) appends one plain object (it never throws); list({ limit = 200, since = 0, decision, source }) returns entries newest first, filtered on an entry's ts (ms), decision and source; count() is the number held. The cap is at least 50. Only those three entry fields are read by the log; the rest of an entry is the writer's. With enabled: false it neither reads nor writes. A node keeps its own log (node.decisions() lists it).

@sym-bot/sym/store exports openStore(cmbsDir, name) for the store of an identity whose process has stopped (a crew that dissolved) when a person's verdict still has to land in it. cmbsDir is the cmbs directory of the node directory, which the main entry finds: path.join(identity.nodeDirById(identity.nodeIdForName(name)), 'cmbs'). It never creates the directory (a missing one throws ENOSTORE) and returns a frozen handle of three methods and nothing else: get(key) (a copy of the stored entry, or null; of the entry, key, cmb, lifecycle ('observed', 'validated', 'canonical' or 'dismissed') and anchorWeight are promised, its other members are not); validateCMB(key, { lifecycle }) and dismissCMB(key, { lifecycle }), each returning { ok, reason? } with reason one of 'insufficient-authority' or 'unknown-cmb'. Validated sets anchorWeight 2.0, dismissed 0.5 (MMP §6.4). lifecycle is the authority the caller exercises, 'validated' or 'canonical'; the handle refuses a caller that states none, but it cannot check the claim: a store is files, and whoever can open the directory can write it. Open a store only while no node holds it, because a running node keeps its own copy in memory; for a running node call node.validateCMB(key) and node.dismissCMB(key), which resolve the node's own authority (MMP §6.5, validator or above, from its grants or, with no anchor pinned, its configured lifecycleRole) and return the same { ok, reason? }.

Constructor options a host may rely on. new SymNode({ ... }) also takes:

The semantic encoder switch. By default a node starts loading the semantic model when it is built (requiring sym loads nothing, since 0.14.1), and SVAF and §15.8 use it once it is ready. That is a heavy load in the host's own process. semanticEncoder: 'off', or SYM_SEMANTIC_ENCODER=off in the environment, means nothing loads the model: SVAF and the §15.8 lineage tether measure in the n-gram kernel, kernelId() is ngram-h32, and remix() mints with its lineage and unverified, as it does when the calibrated kernel is unavailable, saying so once. The encoder is one per process, so it is a setting of the process: any node built with 'off', or the environment variable, turns it off for every node in the process, and it stays off. Set it before the first node is built; a model that was already loaded is no longer used. Any other semanticEncoder value throws a TypeError with code EBADENCODER; any other environment value is said and ignored.

• Full technical reference
• One-page architecture overview
• Research-team walkthrough
• MMP specification
• Contributing

Apache 2.0 — LICENSE.

Built and owned by SYM.BOT, the trading name of SYMBOT LTD — Glasgow, Scotland.