v0.1.0-beta.1 — Orphus enters beta

Orphus enters beta 🎛️

Orphus is an agent harness whose agents deliberate in rooms that live outside their context windows — a verbose peer cannot inflate your context, because what enters it is bounded by the runtime, not by prompt discipline. This first beta marks the point where the whole loop works end to end and updates itself.

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kelvincushman/orphus/main/install.sh | sh
orphus

macOS arm64 and Linux x64 (glibc ≥ 2.27). Checksums verified, versioned installs with rollback, and from then on orphus update is the only upgrade command you will ever run — it checks these releases, reinstalls in place, and keeps prior versions on disk.

What the beta brings

Fleets. /fleet <name> <task> runs a shareable blueprint of agent teams — dispatch fan-outs, room deliberations with per-member briefs and models, or both in sequence. /fleetsetup authors a blueprint by interview, offering model seats only from providers you have actually configured. Six example blueprints ship in the box, from a coding team to a blog-from-YouTube pipeline.

Deliberation that holds. Panel members join rooms under their own broker identities, argue across bounded digests, and settle with FINAL: positions the orchestrator synthesizes into a decision of record. Joining the room is a member's mandatory first act — a panelist that researches brilliantly but never speaks is reported as a defect, not silently absorbed.

A model ladder, not a monoculture. The orchestration protocol routes each piece of work to the cheapest seat that can do it well — frontier models direct and verify, bulk and spinner seats execute — and verification crosses model families on purpose.

Headless works. orphus -p "/fleet design-team <question>" runs a full panel from a script and prints the decision. Rooms are reachable from external MCP-capable agent CLIs too, via the bundled stdio bridge.

MCP 2026-07-28, self-updating installs, and the digest contract — the bundled demo still proves a late-joining reviewer catches up on a 9-message discussion for ~32% of the raw transcript cost, with the decision messages verbatim.

Known edges

• Windows has no archive yet; the installer names what is supported on unsupported hosts.
• GitHub's release list can lag ~a minute right after a release is published; an orphus update in that window may briefly see the previous version.

Feedback

Issues and PRs welcome — the repository's AGENTS.md describes how changes are made here: smallest correct change, evidence over assumption, and every fix lands with the regression test that proves it.