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A self-developing agent.
This is an experimental agent project. Its core idea comes from Carl Jung — the Self.
The name Barney is in memory of my dog.
The agent learns from its own experience — tasks that worked and tasks that failed.
It remembers that experience, can reuse it, and can draw connections.
It runs as a CLI or a web portal.
Almost all “self-learning” is still mechanistic. The agent is given a hard role in advance (“who you are”). If a task fails, it rewrites its own code or a dynamic skill and spins that loop. That agent does not learn in the human sense. It does not understand why it failed — it retunes itself in the hope that a new configuration will work. A person who makes a mistake does not perform a lobotomy.
Barney is built the other way around. Existence precedes essence: an act first, then a line in the Self. The kernel keeps one turn shape — plan, tool, observe, review — and will not let the current task rewrite that shape. Around the kernel a new body grows: skills that already exist, a tool of its own if none fits, recorded failures (Shadow), recorded paths that worked (light).
Review looks at whether the requested result happened, not how confident the prose sounded. Persistence (wanting to continue) is not the same as satisfaction (liking the result).
The agent also follows four layers of harness around the model.
| Constrain | Sandbox, budget, the same call blocked. Physically impossible, not “strictly forbidden”. |
| Inform | Turn law, session facts, lessons, Self. Code assembles what the model sees this step. |
| Verify | Review looks at the result (file, run, secret, URL), not at confident prose. |
| Correct | Change tool family, record a lesson. Do not hammer the same call. |
Stays in src/ |
Lives in ~/.barney |
|---|---|
| Turn loop, review, budgets, sandbox | Skills, plugins, MCP |
| Immune constitution | Self (compass, character, light, shadow) |
| Tool protocol | Notes, episodes, body git |
These names describe the runtime. They are not a hard role pasted into a system prompt.
| In the runtime | |
|---|---|
| Self | Character in action. Grows from deeds. Cannot be replaced wholesale. |
| Ego | This turn: plan, tools, observe, review. Center of the step, not of the whole. |
| Persona | The visible reply. A mask, not the center. |
| Shadow | Recorded failures. They are not overwritten until they are worked through. |
| Motive / action / operation | Why this session exists / what this step is / which tool runs. |
| Wanting ≠ liking | Keep going by changing path, not by hammering the same call. |
| Dream | Idle time compresses raw Shadow into a few heuristics. |
| Frustration | Enough failed paths → stop and ask for a paradigm shift, naming the stuck Shadow. |
| Shadow recall | Similar past fails surface before the act (embeddings when the host supports them). |
| Verified skill | A skill is pinned only after a recovery that worked — not invented mid-miss. |
| Analyze then plan | Same model: what must be true, then the steps, then the act and review. |
transfer_success_lift = pass(kernel-test) − pass(kernel-fresh)
On house-redact / house-merge (qwen3.8:latest, 2026-09-15):
| Case | train | kernel-test | no-kernel | kernel-fresh | lift | recall_helped |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
house-redact |
PASS | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | 1 | 1 |
house-merge |
PASS | PASS | FAIL | FAIL | 1 | 1 |
kernelLift = 0 (both controls fail). Spaced not run past immediate.
Report: docs/proof/2026-09-15-fourhand-qwen38. Re-run: docs/evals.md. Law: docs/experience.md.
The body always lives in ~/.barney. The kernel can be installed three ways.
Needs Bun ≥ 1.4.
bun add -g @encsch/barney
barney webOr npm install -g @encsch/barney — bun still has to be on PATH (the launcher uses it).
Download the file for your platform from Releases:
| File | Platform |
|---|---|
barney-darwin-arm64 |
macOS Apple Silicon |
barney-darwin-x64 |
macOS Intel |
barney-linux-x64 |
Linux x64 |
barney-linux-arm64 |
Linux ARM64 |
barney-windows-x64.exe |
Windows x64 |
curl -L -o barney https://github.com/sergey-show/barney/releases/latest/download/barney-darwin-arm64
chmod +x barney
./barney webNeeds Bun ≥ 1.4.
git clone https://github.com/sergey-show/barney.git
cd barney
bun install
bun run build:web
bun run web # portal → http://127.0.0.1:7331
bun run cli
bun bin/barney run "task"Your own binary: bun run build:bin → ./dist/barney.
Bind a model. Cloud keys are picked up on boot:
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=... # or OPENAI_API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY
barney providers add --name local --host http://127.0.0.1:11434/v1 --use
barney providers use local --model <id-from-/v1/models>On first boot the instance is not designed yet. Setup is by points, or shortly canon. After design, essence is written by deeds.
barney web |
web portal (--port 7331, --host 127.0.0.1) |
barney acp |
ACP v1 agent over stdio |
barney cli |
Interactive session |
barney run "<goal>" |
One shot |
barney providers ls |
LLM providers |
barney providers add --name … --host … |
add an OpenAI-compatible endpoint |
barney providers use <id> --model … |
Bind the model (plan, act, review) |
barney agents ls |
Instances |
The interactive CLI has the same session boundary as Web. Use /help inside it;
key flows include /new, /sessions [query], /open <id>, /memory [query],
/note <key>, /work, /status, /continue, /retry, and Ctrl+C to stop
the active step without leaving the CLI.
Barney exposes the same local session lifecycle to IDEs through stable ACP v1.
Configure an ACP client to launch barney-agent, or run barney acp directly.
The transport is JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio; no hosted service or network listener
is started. The first ACP prompt creates the Barney run in the client's cwd,
later prompts reuse it, and cancellation uses the same runtime path as Web and
CLI.
~/.barney is the body. Git there is the biography of becoming.
~/.barney/
barney.sqlite # agents, runs, memory
self/ # Self
skills/ plugins/ mcp/
worktrees/ # per-run checkouts
How the body grows — tools, plugins, MCP. English and Russian.
| Docs | Index |
| Evals | How to run four-hand, Harbor, unit tests |
| Experience | Hard transfer proof (transfer_success_lift) |
| Tools | Kernel tool protocol |
| Plugins | Skills and UI in ~/.barney |
| MCP | Local stdio servers the agent can start itself |
MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 Sergey Chugay.