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Getting Started with ProbOS

What ProbOS Is

ProbOS is a probabilistic agent-native OS runtime -- a coordinated mesh of domain agents that handle natural-language work via consensus voting, Bayesian trust, and Hebbian-learned routing.

Unlike a single-agent assistant, ProbOS:

  • Decomposes your request into a directed-acyclic graph of typed intents.
  • Routes each intent to the agent best suited to handle it (learned weights).
  • Governs consequential operations through multi-agent consensus voting and the Captain's approval; each intent declares whether its vote authorizes the act beforehand or scores it afterwards.
  • Records every step in episodic memory for replay and continuous learning.

Why It's Different

  • Agent-native: every component is an autonomous agent. No central planner decides which agent thinks about what — agents self-organize via capability matching and learned routing — while deterministic services guarantee durable workflow steps such as recovery and exactly-once delivery.
  • Probabilistic consensus: consequential operations go to a multi-agent quorum vote with confidence weighting and Shapley attribution, and each intent declares whether its vote authorizes the act or scores it afterwards.
  • Bayesian trust: each agent carries a Beta(alpha, beta) reputation that the runtime updates after every interaction.
  • Self-modification: capability gaps trigger LLM-based agent design, static analysis, and probationary trust before promotion.

Where Things Live

  • ~/.probos/config.yaml -- your runtime configuration, written by probos setup. Without it, a source checkout's config/system.yaml is used.
  • The data directory -- episodic memory, trust DB, and runtime state: ~/AppData/Local/ProbOS/data on Windows, ~/Library/Application Support/ProbOS/data on macOS, and $XDG_DATA_HOME/ProbOS/data (by default ~/.local/share/ProbOS/data) elsewhere. probos --data-dir DIR uses another one.
  • ~/.probos/knowledge/ -- the agent's knowledge repository.

probos doctor prints the config file and data directory it checked.

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