Project status: pre-1.0, active development — APIs, schema, and layout may change between 0.x releases. Pinned to a specific Hermes-Agent version (see engine-manifest.yaml).

Cost warning: OKEngine is designed to run autonomous agents on a schedule. With empty feeds it is almost free, but once you add active sources it can make continuous LLM calls. A busy pack can cost real money. Read docs/operating-cost.md and set provider-side hard caps before enabling ingest crons.

OKEngine (short for Open Knowledge Engine) turns an agent into a wiki maintainer. It watches sources, writes structured markdown pages, links them together, repairs drift, and keeps the wiki useful over time. Swap the domain pack and the same engine can maintain a security wiki, an investor wiki, a legal wiki, a research wiki, or a product-intelligence wiki.

a live deployment today = OKEngine @ a pinned Hermes + one pack **or bundle**

The catalyst was Andrej Karpathy's LLM-wiki pattern: an agent should accumulate knowledge in a durable wiki instead of rediscovering it from scratch on every query. OKF compatibility is the small portability floor (type in YAML frontmatter); OKEngine's core is the swappable-topic LLM-wiki engine.

New here? Start with docs/overview.md.

A raw article:

Acme Security acquires LogLens to add cloud detection telemetry.

The pack decides what that means and writes a typed page:

---
type: vendor
title: Acme Security
sources:
  - "[[sources/2026/06/acme-acquires-loglens]]"
updated: 2026-06-21
---

# Acme Security

Acme Security is expanding from endpoint detection into cloud telemetry through
the LogLens acquisition.

## Strategic read

The deal suggests Acme is repositioning against cloud-native detection vendors.

The engine then handles the generic work: validate the write, update indexes, refresh hot sets, maintain backlinks, expose reader/MCP/search surfaces, and run repair drains if the page drifts.

Most "chat with your docs" systems answer a question and forget the work. OKEngine uses an agent plus a wiki instead:

• Sources are compiled once into reusable pages.
• Entities, concepts, predictions, and sources are cross-linked.
• Claims and predictions can be revisited and graded.
• Maintenance jobs keep the corpus healthy.
• Search loads already-synthesized knowledge, not just raw chunks.

RAG can still be a retrieval technique. It is not the memory layer. The wiki is the memory.

The engine ships zero domain knowledge. A pack supplies the domain: schema.yaml, persona, feeds, prompts, crons, optional seed content, and runtime configuration.

A pack deploys standalone, or several compose into one vault: kind: bundle recipes and framework install-domain merge packs with disjoint type/namespace ownership behind a coinstall preflight (framework compose-preview shows the merged shape first).

• Enforced write path: okengine-mcp/write_server.py validates agent writes, guards against field loss, blocks reserved files, tombstones instead of deleting, and logs writes.
• Self-maintaining corpus: cron jobs refresh indexes, hot sets, tiers, wikilinks, schema health, source freshness, and repair queues.
• Reader: okengine-reader/ is a read-only web UI for the wiki.
• MCP query surface: okengine-mcp/ exposes read-only tools such as search, page fetch, references, and page listing.
• Framework CLI: scripts/framework.py manages pack lifecycle and discovers, plans, executes, resumes, cancels, and inspects durable operations contributed by packs/extensions.
• OKF-compatible floor: markdown + YAML pages with the minimal type field baseline where conformance is enabled.

1. Clone the engine

   git clone <engine-repo> okengine

   No manual Hermes/patch/overlay work needed — deploy.sh (step 3) builds the hermes-agent Docker image (pinned Hermes + patches/ + overlay) on first run. The deployable docker-compose.yml ships with the pack (step 2), not the engine. See INSTALL.md for the build internals / by-hand path.

2. Get a domain pack

   Use a catalog pack:

   python scripts/framework.py list
   python scripts/framework.py pull <pack> ../my-brain

   Or scaffold a new one:

   python scripts/framework.py init ../my-brain --domain "..."
   python scripts/framework.py validate ../my-brain

   The engine checkout and vault are separate sibling directories: okengine/ + my-brain/.

3. Deploy from the vault directory

   bash ../okengine/scripts/deploy.sh

OKEngine is a 24/7 autonomous agent system. With an empty feed list, ingest crons are wake-gated and the LLM rarely fires. Once you populate feeds, it can make LLM API calls continuously. Cost depends on feed volume, prompts, model choice, and retry behavior.

Controls:

• Use a local/free model where possible.
• Set hard spend caps with your model provider.
• Enable the budget-guard cron.
• Read docs/operating-cost.md before adding feeds.

• docs/overview.md — start here: concept, packs, and architecture.
• docs/operating-cost.md — token/cost model and budget controls.
• INSTALL.md — install OKEngine on pinned Hermes.
• docs/install-selected-pack.md — install an existing pack.
• docs/install-okpack-cti.md — install the security/threat-intel pack.
• docs/install-okpack-ai-research.md — install the AI/LLM research-watch pack.
• docs/authoring-a-pack.md — author a new pack.
• docs/source-connectors.md — declarative Bundle, Query, Enrichment, and Stream/Poll source acquisition.
• docs/deploy-a-new-domain.md — pack spec and deployment guide.
• docs/engine-domain-boundary.md — engine vs pack boundary.
• docs/okf/okengine-conformance-spec.md — OKEngine conformance profile and OKF compatibility floor.
• docs/okf/ — LLM-wiki guides: pattern, vault building, integrations, and scaling.
• engine-manifest.yaml — engine-layer file list and pinned dependencies.

Runtime dependencies are cloned separately and pinned in engine-manifest.yaml:

• Hermes-Agent — the agent runtime. OKEngine consumes it as a pinned dependency and carries a small patch set under patches/.
• cron-plus — subprocess-per-job scheduler for the cron fleet.

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE. Carried patches under patches/ are diffs against Hermes; Hermes' own license governs Hermes code.