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AIOS: a workspace for you, a brain for the team

What AIOS is, why we built it, and what we're shipping. An open-source operating system for people and agents working together.

John Ellison

John Ellison

5 min read

After nine months of working on AI transformations for 50 to 150 person companies, we’ve packaged up our learnings into an open-source toolkit anyone can use.

AIOS is an AI-powered operating system for agentic teams. Every person gets a structured agent workspace. The team gets one shared brain that learns how you work and helps you collaborate. It’s MIT-licensed and self-hosted, and you decide what leaves your machine.

It’s two repos, one system. There is no third moving part to manage.

Four private individual workspaces push team-tier work along connectors into one central team-brain hub, and a single client-tier flow runs outward from the brain to a client node on the right.
Private workspaces push team work into one brain. Some of it flows out to clients.

Why we built it

We built AIOS by helping companies become AI-native organizations. Along the way we built the systems and tools that reduce the friction of working with agents, and the safeguards that keep teams out of the traps that usually get in the way.

The first thing you notice is that the bottleneck moved. For twenty years, the way teams organize work assumed developer time was the scarce resource. Sprints, story points, and backlog grooming all exist to ration it. Agents broke that assumption. When everyone can build, the scarce resource is no longer hours. It’s context: who knows what, what’s been decided, and what’s actually true right now. (I wrote about why the old operating model breaks in Beyond the Sprint.)

Working with agents on your own is amazing. In a team, it breaks down fast.

  • Context bloats. Every agent’s context balloons on its own, and no two people are working from the same picture.
  • Tools entangle. MCPs, APIs, CLIs, and sync tools pile up until keeping them aligned costs more than the work itself.
  • The speed gap widens. Contributors with agents move ten times faster than those without. With no shared structure, that gap creates chaos, not momentum.
  • The team drifts. People tunnel into execution and lose the thread on OKRs and customers. Speed in the wrong direction is just faster waste.

None of this is only a tooling problem. Becoming AI-native is a human one. Leadership has to actually decide to do it, then create the space and conditions for people to learn. Working with agents is a maturity spectrum, and people need tooling that meets them where they are, not a terminal they were never going to open.

There’s a coordination problem too, and it shows up quickly. Agentic teams move at a velocity the rest of the org simply can’t match. If only the terminal-comfortable engineers can keep up, the team splits in two. Everyone needs a way to work agentically and stay coordinated, whether or not they live in a command line. And left alone, everyone reinvents the same harnesses and skills to do the same jobs, with the best patterns stuck on one person’s machine.

AIOS is the layer on top that addresses this. You keep your runtime, your editor, your stack. Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, whatever you reach for. AIOS gives that work a shape the team can share.

How it works

Each person works in a numbered folder spine: context, inbox, work, log, shared, personal. The same six folders every time, so an agent always knows where it is and where things go.

The six-folder workspace spine from 0-context to 5-personal, each row tagged with a tier badge: private, team, or external.
One numbered spine. Every folder carries the tier that decides whether it syncs.

Everything you create carries an access tier, and the tier decides what is private, what reaches the team, and what goes to clients or the wider company. Nothing leaves your machine without a push.

Three access tiers shown as a gate: private work stays in the workspace, team work flows to the brain, external work flows outward to clients and company.
Private stays home. Team and external only move on a push.

team tier

Charters, deliverables, working docs. This is the shared layer: tasks, decisions, and memory the whole team can query in plain English.

Syncs?
Syncs to the team brain
Visible to
Everyone on the team

The shared tier is where the team brain comes in. Pushed work becomes shared memory: tasks, decisions, deliverables, all queryable in plain English across the whole team. One place to ask what’s happening, instead of ten.

What we’re shipping

A few concrete pieces are live today.

The individual workspace

Scaffold a workspace in a few commands and you get the numbered spine, governance conventions, validators, and multi-agent harnesses out of the box. There’s a UI as well, so people who don’t live in a terminal get the same harnesses, connections, and memory one click away. And when someone finds a harness or skill that works, the AIOS MCP syncs it to the rest of the team, in Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, wherever they work, so the best patterns spread instead of getting reinvented.

The AIOS individual workspace GUI: a chat panel where an agent reads the decision log and reports what changed this week, beside a sidebar of workspace tools (Chat, Integrations, Skills, Review & Push, Settings) and recent history.
The workspace UI: chat with an agent that reads your log, ships deliverables, and updates memory, all on your machine.

The team brain

A shared hub that receives tier-tagged pushes from every workspace and turns them into shared memory: tasks, decisions, and deliverables you can query in plain English. It holds the team’s OKRs and KPIs next to the work, so people prioritize against the real, current state instead of a status meeting. Scope and drift guards flag when a workstream wanders off the top-level goals.

The AIOS team brain dashboard: a plain-English query bar over headline stats for memories, decisions, and open tasks, plus knowledge-growth, recent activity, and tasks-by-member panels.
The team brain: tasks, decisions, and memory, queryable in plain English.

The Insights Engine

The newest piece, built by my co-founder Chetan. A context engine that learns from everything flowing through the brain and surfaces the signal: the patterns worth copying, the work that’s drifting, the context each person needs next. It’s where some genuinely interesting ML lives, and it’s what turns shared memory into something that actively makes the team smarter.

The Insights Engine as a vertical pipeline: sources feed grain extraction, grains sort across working, episodic, and semantic memory tiers, then compose into a context window that answers queries with cited responses, with a feedback loop returning to ingestion.
The Insights Engine: it breaks everything in the brain into typed grains, files them by temperature across three memory tiers, and composes just the right context to answer any query, with citations.

It all pulls into the tools you already use: Slack, GitHub, Linear, Notion, Granola, and more.

Where this is going

We’re building in public, and the direction is a flywheel. The more context flows into the brain, the smarter it gets; the smarter it gets, the better the skills people build; the better the skills, the more context flows back. What Claude Code did for individual agent productivity, we want AIOS to do for a whole team.

A few of the things on the way:

  • Learning journeys. We built a readiness assessment and tailored training to a person’s role and where they sit on the maturity curve. Those become learning journeys inside AIOS, across 20-plus job functions, so people level up in whatever tool they already use.
  • Real-time coaching. Every agent session gets evaluated for token efficiency and impact, with targeted feedback on becoming a more effective agentic engineer.
  • Toward orchestration. As agents take on more of the execution, even running the board, people move up into orchestration. The division of labor shifts for good.
  • A public, live roadmap board, so this list stops living in a blog post.

If you want to try it, get the workspace. If you want to shape it, the project is on GitHub. Either way, the RSS feed will keep you posted, and the parts that are still rough will show up here too.