You run an agent inside Elpis, and it becomes Elpis.
More QUALITY. More QUANTITY.
Linux x86_64 and macOS on Apple Silicon:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MasihMoafi/Elpis/main/scripts/install-elpis.sh | bash && ~/.local/bin/elpisThe installer picks the right binary for your machine and also installs RTK, which powers shell-output filtering. On first launch, choose a provider and sign in or enter its API key.
v0.1.2 is the current release.
The agent runs the model loop. Elpis owns everything around it: context, memory, continuity, retrieval, permissions, and provider choice.
Swap the agent and it inherits the same environment. Nothing about your project has to be explained twice.
Different paths. Same roots. One shared project.
Long sessions fill up with transcripts, file reads, searches, and dead ends. Agents consume massive token budgets and execute dense sequences of tool calls to gather context—most of which is redundant and unnecessary. What matters gets buried in the story of how the agent got there, and every request pays for it.
Elpis keeps the two apart. The next request gets a small working set you can inspect. The full record stays on disk and is fetched only when it is needed.
The screenshots below are historical examples of the same prompt in Elpis and Codex. The original per-run records were not preserved.
A pinned, synthetic 3×10 comparison for exact recall, paraphrased recall, and negative controls is specified in docs/evals/context-continuity. It has a deterministic scorer, but no score is published because the required provider runs and raw transcripts have not been produced.
Historical screenshots
Start:
Example end state — Elpis:
Example end state — Codex:
| Level | What it does | When |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Shell-output filtering | Supported commands are rewritten through RTK's PreToolUse hook, before their output ever reaches the model. In one real investigation it removed 72–97% of three broad rg outputs. The installer installs RTK and Elpis registers the hook on first launch, where you trust it like any other hook. |
Before the agent sees it |
| 2. Safety cap | Deterministic truncation bounds exceptionally large tool output. Inherited from Codex, unchanged. | Before the agent sees it |
| 3. Ace steady pass | Meaning-aware. Useful results become a compact conclusion plus an evidence pointer; dead ends leave the working context entirely. A failed pass changes nothing. | After completed work creates enough eligible output |
| 4. Ace pressure pass | Runs the same selective process earlier, at 70% remaining, and aims to return the session to 80% remaining. | Before context pressure harms the next turn |
/prune runs Ace selectively on demand while keeping the conversation intact.
/compact replaces the conversation with a full summary and starts a new context window.
Tab — or Alt+C while a turn is running — opens a side panel listing every source admitted into the working set, each with its size and whether it is included. Toggling a row changes what the next turn actually receives, so context selection becomes an intentional operation instead of a side effect.
/context answers a different question: not what is admitted, but what filled the window. It shows usage as a grid broken down by category — user messages, agent responses, tool calls, system prompt, skills, free space — alongside the backtrack checkpoints you can jump to.
Full uncut session — context pruning, ledger, and /context in one recorded run
Goal and checkpoint state survive compaction, model switches, and restarts, so work resumes without replaying the transcript. Exact conversations, terminal events, and artifacts remain on disk as durable evidence.
Reusable memory is designed to be selective, size-capped, and attributable. It ships
off, matching upstream Codex. Extraction works, but durable promotion has not produced a
real MEMORY.md commit on Masih's install because the current recall threshold is not
reached in normal use. /memories controls recall and writing independently; no claim
that durable memory works is accepted without a promotion commit in the memories
repository. See the measured state and eval.
Elpis ships no retrieval or speech engine and downloads no models. MCP servers keep optional capabilities in their own processes, with their own dependencies and disk costs; /mcp confirms the servers you register are connected.
- Workspace retrieval: rag-mcp provides local semantic search over your own documents. Its embeddings, vector store, reranker, and any API key remain yours. See docs/rag.md.
- Voice transcription: Voice Commander records speech, transcribes it locally, and pastes at the active cursor. It remains an external companion; it can expose transcription as an MCP tool rather than adding Whisper, CUDA, Python, or model downloads to Elpis.
No analytics are uploaded, and every OpenTelemetry exporter defaults to off — telemetry is sent only if you configure an exporter yourself. Bring your own keys: use OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or OpenRouter without one provider being silently routed through another. Durable state is plain files you can inspect, edit, export, or delete.
- Windows support.
- Structured clarification and acceptance checks before difficult work.
/automodel routing after it proves a real cost benefit.- Voice input and LSP-backed code intelligence.
- Context and pruning — the four context-control layers and the Context Ledger
- Sessions and continuity — exact resume, lean continuation,
GOAL.md/ES.md - Memory — the two-stage pipeline, the archive, and what you control
- Evals — source data, reproducible scorers, and publication gates
- Providers — every supported route, including local inference
- Workspace retrieval — how to plug in semantic search over your own documents
- Technical guide — product vision and architecture
Apache-2.0.
The execution foundation — terminal UI, patches, permissions, sandboxing, sessions — derives from OpenAI's Apache-2.0 Codex CLI. Elpis adds the context, continuity, memory, retrieval, and provider-control layer around it. Codex-derived source retains its upstream notices under codex-rs/.