What is covey?

covey runs AI agents like employees: every agent has an identity, an isolated workplace, brokered access to target systems, a backlog and a place in the org chart. The guiding metaphor is the IT and HR department for AI agents — and it is meant literally, right down to how the software is built.

Technically, covey is one Go binary next to a Postgres database. The admin interface is compiled in, so are the migrations. No nginx in front, no separate frontend hosting, no message broker on the side. The licence is AGPL-3.0; you run it yourself, on your own machine, with your own keys.

What covey is for

For the moment a company runs more than one agent and somebody asks who has actually been watching. That is: who gave this agent that access, what did it do with it last week, what did it cost, and who stops it when it goes wrong.

This is also where the line against an agent framework runs, and it is narrower than it sounds. covey does not replace a framework, it operates one. Who the agent is, what it may reach, when it runs and what it keeps are all covey's to set: SOUL.md is compiled into the system prompt, HEARTBEAT.md sets the cadence, ACCESS.md the access, the wiki the memory. That is the same surface LangChain or CrewAI claim, and talking it away would be dishonest.

What covey does not do is drive the model loop — sit between the model and the tool call and decide the next step. That is the runtime's job (Core concepts), and because it stays there, the runtime hangs off a thin adapter and is replaceable. The first one is Claude Code headless.

The organisation is the unit, not the user

covey belongs to no single person. The unit is the organisation, and everything else follows from that: agents are organisation-owned resources, their secrets live in the organisation's vault, their cost lands on its account, and several people in different roles look at the same workforce — IT, team lead, security, audit, controlling.

This is the load-bearing distinction from single-user apps that promise a personal "AI employee". Their model ends where the second person needs a say.

Counterparts in the company

Nearly every component has a counterpart everyone knows from working life. If you know the left-hand column, you can read the right-hand one:

• Identity / Active Directory → agent identity, optionally with its own email address
• Workstation / PC → isolated sandbox with a persistent /home
• Onboarding / role description → SOUL.md, versioned like code
• Password vault / PAM → secrets broker, short-lived tokens at runtime
• Task list / ticket → backlog as an object in its own right
• Operations manual / compliance → central guard-rails, enforced outside the prompt
• SIEM / EDR → session recording, cost per run, an emergency stop for the whole organisation

What covey is not

Not a model and not a model vendor — covey brings your own account (an Anthropic API key or a subscription token). Not a chat window; work arrives from a backlog, a webhook or a heartbeat, not from a conversation. And not a cloud: there is a public instance to look at, but the normal case is your own.

Next

• Core concepts — the terms that recur everywhere
• Architecture overview — control plane, data plane, daemon protocol
• Quick start (Docker) — the install in five lines