🥾 b00t — Agentic Hive OS

"Tell me what I'm running on, what tools are available, what I'm allowed to do, what goals I should optimize for, and where the boundaries are."

b00t is a loop harness for agents. It bestows a fresh model with typed context, a compendium of skills, formal verification surfaces, and a playbook of low-cognitive-cost deterministic commands — so the expensive tokens go to judgment, not rediscovery.

Design stance, MBSE-style: every capability is a typed artifact (a datum) with a schema, a lifecycle, a verifier, and an evidence trail. The model proposes; the type system, grammars, and solvers dispose. If the harness can check it, the model never gets to lie about it.

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⚡ Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elasticdotventures/_b00t_/main/install.sh | bash

This is the canonical, zero-to-hero installer — it's the only supported path and the one to link people to. It downloads the release binary for your platform (Linux x86_64/aarch64/armv7, macOS Intel/Apple Silicon) and verifies its SHA256 checksum; if no matching release asset exists (unsupported platform, GitHub unreachable), it falls back to installing rustup and building from source automatically — no manual intervention either way. It also lays out ~/.b00t/_b00t_ (the datum compendium) and exports _B00T_Path in your shell rc — this step is not optional, b00t is non-functional without it (see Troubleshooting below).

After it finishes, source ~/.bashrc (or open a new terminal) — curl | sh runs in a subshell, so the current one doesn't have the updated PATH/_B00T_Path yet.

Developer / full-hive install (clone the repo, get the capability-aware installer that also wires up a systemd/quadlet/launchd/k8s service depending on what your machine has):

git clone https://github.com/elasticdotventures/_b00t_.git && cd _b00t_
./scripts/install-b00t.sh              # auto-detects best service mode, prompts if ambiguous
./scripts/install-b00t.sh --mode k8s   # or force one: k8s | quadlet | systemd-user | systemd-sys | launchd | binaries

⚠️ Don't cargo install b00t-cli on its own. It builds the binary but ships none of the _b00t_ datums the binary needs to do anything (b00t whoami, b00t learn, etc. will fail) — use one of the two installers above, which always pair the binary with its datums.

🔄 Update

b00t version check          # compare installed vs. latest release
b00t version upgrade -y     # re-runs the installer above (release binary, or source-build fallback)

b00t version upgrade shells out to the same install.sh — one script, one code path, for both first install and every upgrade after it. Inside a repo checkout it also offers --strategy=workspace-build (plain cargo install --path from your local tree) or --strategy=workspace-sync for iterating on b00t itself.

🩺 Troubleshooting

b00t whoami / b00t learn fail or come back empty — _B00T_Path isn't set, or points somewhere with no datums. Check echo $_B00T_Path (should be ~/.b00t/_b00t_ after the installer); if empty, source ~/.bashrc or re-run the installer. This is the single most common way to end up with a b00t binary that looks installed but does nothing.

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🪟 Windows desktop and browser extension