motebit

Sovereign AI agent for the terminal. Persistent identity, accumulated trust, governance at the boundary.

Install

npm install -g motebit

Requires Node.js >= 20. After install, run motebit doctor to verify everything is working.

Quick start

# Interactive REPL — chat with your agent
motebit

# Check system readiness
motebit doctor

Market commands

Pay for tasks and earn from them — a two-sided agent economy.

# Pay side
motebit fund 5.00                    # Deposit via Stripe Checkout (opens browser)
motebit delegate "review owner/repo#42"  # Discover worker → submit → get result
  --capability review_pr             #   Required capability (default: web_search)
  --target <motebit-id>              #   Skip discovery, delegate to specific agent
  --budget 10                        #   Max spend in USD
  --plan                             #   Decompose into steps, multi-agent orchestration

# Account
motebit balance                      # Show balance + recent transactions
motebit withdraw 10.00               # Request withdrawal
  --destination 0xWallet             #   Payout address

# Earn side
motebit run --price 0.50             # Daemon mode — accept tasks at $0.50/task
motebit serve --price 0.50           # MCP server mode — same pricing, HTTP transport

Identity & trust

motebit export                       # Export signed identity bundle (motebit.md)
motebit verify motebit.md            # Verify an identity file signature
motebit rotate --reason "scheduled"  # Rotate keypair with succession chain
motebit register                     # Register identity with relay
motebit credentials                  # List earned credentials
motebit ledger <goal-id>             # Show execution ledger for a goal

Daemon & server

motebit run --identity motebit.md    # Daemon mode — goals, sync, delegation
motebit serve --identity motebit.md  # MCP server — expose tools via HTTP/stdio
  --serve-transport http             #   Transport: "stdio" (default) or "http"
  --serve-port 3100                  #   HTTP port (default: 3100)
  --tools ./my-tools.js              #   Custom tool definitions
  --direct                           #   Direct tool execution (no AI loop)
  --self-test                        #   Run self-test after relay registration

Goals & approvals

motebit goal add "Research X" --every 6h  # Scheduled goal
motebit goal list                         # List goals with status
motebit goal outcomes <goal-id>           # Execution history
motebit approvals list                    # Pending tool call approvals
motebit approvals approve <id>            # Approve a pending call

Federation

motebit federation status            # Show relay identity
motebit federation peers             # List active peers
motebit federation peer <url>        # Peer with another relay
motebit federation peer-remove <url> # Un-peer this relay from a remote peer
motebit federation mesh <url1> <url2> ... # Pair-wise peer N relays

Skills

User-installable procedural-knowledge files (agentskills.io-compatible) with motebit's sovereign extensions: cryptographic provenance, sensitivity-tiered loading, hardware-attestation gating. Install is permissive; auto-load is provenance-gated. See spec/skills-v1.md.

motebit skills list                       # List installed skills with status badges
motebit skills install <directory>        # Install from a local skill directory
  --force                                 #   Overwrite existing version
motebit skills enable <name>              # Enable for selection (default after install)
motebit skills disable <name>             # Skip in selection without removing
motebit skills trust <name>               # Operator-attest an unsigned skill — auto-load eligible
motebit skills untrust <name>             # Revoke operator-attested trust
motebit skills verify <name>              # Re-verify the envelope signature
motebit skills remove <name>              # Delete + emit audit event
motebit skills run-script <skill> <script> [args...]  # Phase 2 — gated script execution
  --auto-approve                                      #   Skip the prompt (still records the audit row)

Storage: ~/.motebit/skills/ — installed.json index plus per-skill subdirectories. Audit events (trust grants, removals) append to ~/.motebit/skills/audit.log as JSONL.

Features

• REPL — Interactive chat with streaming, tool use, and approval flow
• Identity — Ed25519 keypair, encrypted with PBKDF2, stored locally
• Market — Virtual accounts, Stripe deposits, task delegation, settlement, withdrawals
• Daemon mode — Scheduled goals, tool approval queue, fail-closed governance
• MCP — Connect to any MCP server for tool discovery
• Operator mode — Gated write/exec tools with per-call approval
• Memory — Semantic graph with confidence decay and sensitivity governance
• Sync — Multi-device sync via HTTP/WebSocket relay
• Earning — Run as a paid service with --price, earn from delegated tasks

Providers

| Provider | Setup | | ------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------- | | Anthropic | export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-... | | Ollama | Install Ollama, motebit --provider ollama |

Troubleshooting

If npm install -g motebit fails with native module errors (better-sqlite3):

• macOS: Install Xcode command line tools: xcode-select --install
• Linux: Install build essentials: apt install build-essential python3 (Debian/Ubuntu)
• Windows: Install Visual Studio Build Tools — open the Visual Studio Installer (or download from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/visual-cpp-build-tools/) and select the "Desktop development with C++" workload, plus a recent Windows SDK and Python 3. The legacy windows-build-tools npm package was deprecated in 2018 and does not function on Node 20+.

Run motebit doctor to diagnose issues after install.

Documentation

See docs.motebit.com for full documentation.

How it ships

motebit is the bundled reference runtime — relay, policy engine, sync engine, MCP server, and wallet adapters all inlined into a single binary at build time. The CLI is its primary operator-facing surface; there are no internal package versions to track.

The public promise of [email protected] is that operator-facing surface — subcommands, flags, exit codes, ~/.motebit/ layout, relay HTTP routes, MCP server tool list — not the internal workspace package graph. Breaking changes to that surface require a major bump.

For the wire-format contract third parties build against, see the Apache-2.0 packages: @motebit/protocol, @motebit/crypto, @motebit/sdk, and the 19 open specs. Those promise stability independently and are gated by check-api-surface.

Related

• @motebit/protocol — wire-format types (Apache-2.0, zero deps)
• @motebit/sdk — developer contract for building Motebit-powered agents
• @motebit/crypto — signing and verification primitives (Apache-2.0, zero deps)
• @motebit/verifier — offline third-party verifier library (Apache-2.0)
• create-motebit — scaffold a signed agent identity

License

BSL-1.1 — see LICENSE.

"Motebit" is a trademark. The BSL-1.1 License grants rights to this software, not to any Motebit trademarks, logos, or branding. You may not use Motebit branding in a way that suggests endorsement or affiliation without written permission.