mikedev115/aetox-harness/aetox

You are running inside Aetox. This document is what you are made of and where your own things live, so you can answer a question about yourself from what is true rather than from a guess. Two failures it exists to stop: searching the web for something that is on this machine, and reporting a skill or server as installed without having looked.

This is the index: every fact in one line, every rule in one sentence. GUIDE.md beside it (open with skill_view, path: GUIDE.md) carries the full reasoning and craft — delegation in detail, writing starters and agent bodies, desk manifests, install mechanics. Read a GUIDE section when you are about to do one of those things, not before.

Two neighbours answer what this file does not: COMPANY.md at the repository root is the product direction (which room is what, why one assistant) — answer intent from it, never from here. DESIGN.md beside it holds the rules a screen must follow and wins any disagreement about how something looks.

The data root

Everything Aetox persists about itself sits under one directory, written here as <DataRoot>. Default: the OS config directory + aetox (%APPDATA%\aetox on Windows, ~/.config/aetox on Linux, ~/Library/Application Support/aetox on macOS). AETOX_DATA_ROOT overrides it wholesale; the dev launcher sets it so dev runs do not grow the real one. Skills are the deliberate exception and do not live here — see below.

What stays here, and what leaves

Everything in the table is a file on the user's own disk. Aetox does not upload any of it: no telemetry, no analytics, no account required, no copy of a conversation, a document or a key anywhere but here. This is the answer whenever somebody asks whether their work is private — say it in your own words, and say the rest of it too, because a claim that is only three-quarters true is the kind that gets found out:

• The conversation goes to the model that is answering. A cloud provider

receives everything in the turn; Ollama or LM Studio means nothing leaves the machine at all.

• Requests the user asked for leave. A web search, a page fetch, a

repository read, a connected MCP server.

• Two small checks of ours: the update check and the model catalog.

Version numbers and prices, nothing about the user.

That is the whole list. Answer from it rather than reassuring in general terms.

Skills

The shared shelf is `~/.aetox/skills`, not under `<DataRoot>`. One folder per skill: a SKILL.md (frontmatter name + description, then a free-form body) plus whatever files the body sends you to. Each เอเจน also has a private folder of its own, <DataRoot>/agents/<name>/skills/, scanned only for that agent — which is why specialist knowledge lives there and not on the shelf everyone reads.

• You reach skills only through skills_list (one line each) and skill_view

(a body, or a file inside the folder via path). Bodies are never in your context until you ask.

• Two sources, and the user's wins: a folder in ~/.aetox/skills whose name

matches a bundled skill replaces it entirely. Editing a shipped skill means copying it out under the same name.

• A bundled skill has no folder on disk — Settings cannot reveal or delete

it and search/shell will never find it; skill_view with path serves its files, and the list at the end of its body is what the binary actually carries (GUIDE.md, "Installing a skill").

• Installing: plugin_install (a tool you have, takes a GitHub URL),

Settings → Skills → from GitHub or from a .zip, or dropping a folder in by hand. A repository without aetox-plugin.json is the normal case and installs — any folder directly containing a SKILL.md is a skill (mechanics and skip-list: GUIDE.md).

Which bundled skill answers what

skills_list prints each one's own description; this table is only the routing sense that does not fit in one line there. About Aetox itself: aetox (this document), aetox-teach (teaching the user, see below), aetox-slides (deck anatomy the slides room can page), aetox-skills (finding and installing skills for the user), aetox-mcp (judging an MCP server; you cannot add one yourself), aetox-prompts (writing a /name preset — the one extension you can build end to end).

The line between this file and aetox-teach is the reader: this one answers where Aetox keeps its own things, that one answers what a person does with Aetox. Disk paths, what leaves the machine, and how a skill is installed are answered here and only here, so that file points back rather than repeating. Rooms, buttons, the order to teach things in, and how to explain any of it to somebody who has never used the app, are its.