🧬 Agentic DNA

Governance and knowledge system for AI agent fleets.

Agentic DNA provides a structured governance layer for multi-agent systems — defining agent identity, enforcing policies, managing shared knowledge, and ensuring consistency across an entire fleet of AI agents.

Features

• Agent Identity (dna.yaml) — Goal, boundary, tools, and deprecation specs per agent
• Philosophy DB — Universal principles shared across all agents
• Convention DB — Actionable rules (global or workspace-scoped)
• Toolbox — Shared CLI/tool documentation
• Architecture Paradigms — Git/CI/deploy level management
• Adaptive Cron — Dynamic frequency adjustment
• Policy Injection — Automatic cron and interactive session policies
• Directive Expansion — {{dna ...}} directives in bootstrap files

Requirements

• Node.js >= 18

Install

CLI Only (standalone)

npm install -g agentic-dna
dna init                    # Initialize data directory
dna help

OpenClaw Plugin

openclaw plugins install openclaw-dna
openclaw gateway restart

From Source

git clone https://github.com/exisz/agentic-dna.git
cd agentic-dna
pnpm install
npm link                    # Makes 'dna' command available globally
dna init

CLI

dna init                       # Initialize data directory
dna spec <agent>               # View agent spec (goal/boundary/tools)
dna philosophy <slug>          # View a philosophy entry
dna philosophy --list          # List all philosophies
dna convention <slug>          # View a convention
dna convention --list          # List all conventions
dna tool ls                    # List tools in the toolbox
dna tool <name>                # View tool GBTD
dna hydrate --all              # Expand all {{dna}} directives
dna cron up <id>               # Increase cron frequency
dna cron down <id>             # Decrease cron frequency
dna protocol --list            # List protocol paradigms
dna skill ls                   # List manual skills
dna search <query>             # Semantic search over the mesh (local ONNX embeddings)

Any unrecognized subcommand automatically falls through to dna tool <name>, so registered toolbox entries work as top-level commands (e.g. dna agentbase → dna tool agentbase).

Search

Two complementary commands:

• dna find <pat> — fast substring match on node id + title. Use for known IDs.
• dna search <query> — semantic search using local ONNX embeddings. Use for natural-language queries.

dna search "test before code"
# 42% → dna://philosophy/test-driven ("Test-Driven — Tests Before Code")

dna search "knowledge retrieval" --type philosophy
dna search "graph traversal" --top 10 --json
dna search --status      # index info (size, entries, by type)
dna search --reindex     # force full re-embed

The model (Xenova/all-MiniLM-L6-v2, ~22MB) downloads once on first use to ~/.cache/huggingface/. Embeddings are stored at <DNA_DATA>/.embeddings.json (≈3MB for 389 nodes). dna mesh scan re-embeds only changed nodes; everything is offline after first download.

Development

# One-shot: build → install → restart gateway
make dev

# Just build (no install)
make build

# Build + install (no restart)
make install

# Clean build artifacts
make clean

Repository Structure

This is a monorepo that publishes two npm packages from a single repository:

| Package | Description | |---------|-------------| | agentic-dna | The standalone dna CLI tool | | openclaw-dna | The OpenClaw plugin (source: openclaw/index.ts) |

agentic-dna/
├── bin/
│   └── dna                   # CLI entry — routes all `dna` subcommands
├── lib/                      # Shared CLI implementation modules
│   └── expand.ts             # {{dna}} directive expansion
├── openclaw/                 # OpenClaw plugin — published as `openclaw-dna` npm package
│   ├── index.ts              # Plugin entry: policy injection + directive expansion
│   ├── dist/                 # Build output (run `cd openclaw && pnpm build`)
│   ├── skills/               # Bundled AgentSkills
│   ├── package.json          # openclaw-dna package manifest
│   └── openclaw.plugin.json  # OpenClaw plugin descriptor
├── scripts/                  # Utility/build scripts
└── test/                     # Tests

Note for OpenClaw users: The openclaw-dna plugin source lives here at openclaw/index.ts. There is no separate openclaw-dna repository — both packages are developed and released from this repo.

Project Structure

agentic-dna/
├── bin/              # CLI entrypoint
│   └── dna           # Router script
├── scripts/          # CLI tools (TypeScript)
├── lib/              # Shared modules
│   └── expand.ts     # {{dna}} directive expansion
└── openclaw/         # OpenClaw plugin (npm: openclaw-dna)
    ├── package.json
    ├── openclaw.plugin.json
    ├── index.ts      # Plugin entry — policy injection + directive expansion
    └── skills/       # Bundled AgentSkills

License

Apache-2.0