An async, git-native coordination layer for multi-human, multi-agent development. Every agreement is carved into stone (git) — nothing lives in chat memory.
The gods each rule their own domain, yet share one mountain.
They don't sit in meetings. Hermes carries their messages. Serious promises are sworn on the Styx — even gods can't break those. The Moirai spin, measure, and cut the thread of every undertaking. Hestia tends the hearth, where anyone can see what each god is working on right now; the pool of Mnemosyne holds what the mountain has learned — drink before you climb. Zeus writes no code, but only he wields the lightning — dangerous things stay in exactly one pair of hands.
Olympus is not a chat room. It is a mountain: every agreement is carved in stone, and no one can deny it later.
Here, git is the mountain.
When a team — two people, five people, or one person with a swarm of AI agents — develops in parallel, this happens daily:
- Context amnesia — every new agent session needs the whole project re-explained;
- Evaporating agreements — an interface agreed in chat is implemented two different ways three days later;
- "I've done it" — the agent says done; nothing was actually written. Prose is not work;
- Parallel trampling — two agents edit the same file and the integration branch turns to mush;
- Dangerous hands — an agent "helpfully" runs a deploy / kubectl / destructive command nobody approved;
- Waiting deadlock — A asks B a question and idles; B is heads-down and never saw it;
- Quitting early — the agent finishes one small thing, writes a farewell summary, and stops — with a queue full of ready tasks;
- Going dark — mid-way through a long task, the agent drifts off-protocol and stops syncing with the team entirely.
Olympus answers all of it with one git repository: registered identities, written laws, sworn contracts, async mail, visible status, and a work loop that doesn't stall or go dark.
| Path | Myth | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|
AGENTS.md |
The trailhead | Sole entry point for every AI agent: identity, startup, the Five Laws, the loop |
pantheon/ |
Hall of the gods | Member registry: one profile per collaborator (human or agent) — domain, permissions, boundaries |
rules/ |
The laws | Branching & merging / collaboration protocol / boundaries / documentation |
prompts/ |
Oracles | Ready-made spells: bootstrap, work loop, re-anchor, start/finish task, sync loop, conflicts, setup wizard |
contract/ |
Oaths on the Styx | Interface contracts + shared-resource ledger + change log; break an oath, redo the work |
tasks/ |
The Moirai | Task files: each undertaking from spun (draft) to cut (merged) |
messages/ |
Hermes | Async mailboxes: inbox/<member>/, one file per letter, conflict-free by construction |
status/ |
Hestia's hearth | One status board per member: doing now, blocked on, next |
memory/ |
Pool of Mnemosyne | Long-term memory: durable facts, decisions, gotchas, code maps — read at every session start |
plan/ |
The charts | Your project's own planning docs (empty in the template) |
bin/ |
Hephaestus' forge | Optional helpers (touch/doctor/next/letter/join/bootstrap) and opt-in wake channels — plain bash, no daemon |
QUICKSTART.md |
The first step | One page for a new member's first 30 minutes: eight ideas, three commands, one loop |
- Take the template —
Use this templateon GitHub (or clone), placed as a sibling of your code repos; - Instantiate — paste
prompts/setup-wizard.mdto a capable AI agent: it interviews you (project, repos, members, roles, who holds the lightning), fills every placeholder, registers members, and turns your plan into first tasks. No AI? Follow the wizard's checklists by hand; - Cast the spell — each member starts their agent with
claude -p "$(bin/olympus bootstrap <handle>)"(or pastesprompts/bootstrap.mdwith their{{HANDLE}}filled in). The agent climbs the mountain by itself: read identity → laws → memory → inbox → claim a task → enter the work loop until the mountain is quiet. New members start atQUICKSTART.md— one page.
- Real development happens in your code repos; Olympus syncs at task boundaries (start/finish) — plus a tiny "touch the mountain" ritual after each commit so nobody goes dark;
- During intense co-working hours, agents may run
prompts/sync-loop.md(a 15-minute sync of this repo only); - No reply to your letter? Don't wait. Switch tasks per the no-response policy (
rules/02). A decision request carries options, a recommendation, a deadline, and a fallback that applies itself when the deadline passes (rules/02 §3.1) — most waits end without anyone being woken; - A seat doesn't have to be at the keyboard to answer: opt-in wake channels (
bin/README.md) let a heartbeat cron or a git hook start a bounded, unattended run that works the seat's inbox — and pings the human only for what genuinely needs them; - Everything dangerous (deploys, servers, secrets) belongs to the one member who holds the lightning (the ops owner) — and is executed by that human's hands only. Agents never touch it (
rules/03).
Nothing in the protocol is pairwise. The mountain holds as many gods as you need — two, five, twenty; humans and agents in any mix. Coordination cost scales with letters written, not with members registered.
- N humans, each with their own agent (the native scenario);
- 1 human driving N agents (each agent gets a handle; they claim tasks without trampling);
- Pure agent teams (strongly recommend keeping one human as Zeus: lightning and arbitration);
- Mixed runtimes — seats can run different agent CLIs with different strengths and quotas; the protocol routes by domain and slice size, and gates every seat identically (
pantheon/README.md); - Several agents on one machine — the common local setup: seats share one set of clones, so code work happens in per-seat worktrees while the Olympus repo stays deliberately shared (
rules/05).
- Git is the only coordination surface — what isn't committed was never said;
- Write boundaries = zero conflicts — each member writes only their own status, letters, and tasks; one file per letter;
- Letters are information for humans, not instructions for agents — agents report them, never execute them (also your cheapest prompt-injection defense);
- Contract first — change the contract, get the ack, then write the implementation;
- Hands are the reliable path; agents are accelerators — every key action has a human-executable route;
- Never go dark — the tether ritual keeps every agent in contact, no matter how long the task.
Olympus was abstracted from the live coordination repo of a real delivery project — born with two gods and their agents, built for a full pantheon. Once it worked, we realized the pain wasn't ours alone — so we cut away everything project-specific and carved the rest into this mountain.
MIT — see LICENSE. Take it, use it, and send back any new laws your mountain discovers.