There will be many like it.
This one is yours.

What an operating system does for programs, done for agents: it owns the things no single agent can own for itself — memory that survives sessions, permissions that gate actions before they run, jobs that outlive restarts, and a plugin surface for everything else. The engines stay swappable; the OS is the part that persists. thalamus is that layer, self-hosted on your own hardware.

It will not replace the operating system on your machine. It is an OS in the structural sense: a ten-noun kernel owns jobs, memory, authority and the action log; drivers make engines and memory backends swappable; everything else is a plugin with declared, default-deny capabilities. The test that matters — extending it means writing a plugin, not a fork. v0 is early; the shape is already this.

Others put a task board over one vendor's agent, or host your state for you. thalamus takes the OS position: eight harnesses — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, opencode, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Cline and local models via Ollama — are adapters behind one driver port, jobs are durable and survive restarts, and switching engines leaves your memory, history and trust rules exactly where they were. On your box.

Put the memory outside both of them. Each harness keeps its own session state and forgets across restarts, so anything that must survive belongs in a store neither vendor owns. In thalamus, memory is an OS service behind a driver port: every engine reads and writes the same brain, and swapping engines never resets it.

That's the whole design. Every capability above the kernel is a plugin — four kinds: surfaces, sources, skills and harnesses — each with a manifest, declared capabilities and default-deny permissions. Official ones install with one command; yours can start as a folder a coding agent wrote for you. The current limit: the v0 host runs a bounded reference adapter, and third-party code stays quarantined until the sandbox boundary is real.

Self-hosted only. No account, no tenancy, no hosted service to sign up for — you run it on your own hardware or you don't run it. That is the position, not a roadmap gap: an OS you don't own is someone else's computer with your memory in it.

A machine you control running Linux or macOS, and Node.js — thalamus is TypeScript. It installs as one server that owns the state, the jobs and the permissions; the web app, the desktop app, the iOS app and the CLI are all clients of that one server contract, so what you see is the same on every surface. No account and no tenancy: the server is yours.

Nothing. $0, MIT licensed, self-hosted — the only bills are your own compute and your own model tokens. That follows from the bet: code generation is a commodity, so the OS meters it like one. Spend caps live in the trust gate, and an overnight run has a ceiling you set.

Soon — v0 is close. Today the repository is still private and `curl -fsSL openthalamus.dev/install.sh | sh` is not live yet, so the waitlist below is the real answer: one email the day it runs, and nothing before it. Between now and then, interfaces, contracts and storage layouts can still move.