Ophiuchus docs
Ophiuchus is an early Alpha. It runs as a command-line tool on your own machine and carries working context — including the hypotheses already ruled out — from one coding agent or machine to the next.
Start with the Alpha quickstart. It is the shortest flow
that works today, and every command in it has been run against v0.0.0. Once
you've run it once, Scenarios and usage guidelines shows
the same commands applied to three realistic handoffs, plus guidance on when to
reach for Ophiuchus at all. Fidelity, validity, negative knowledge and
continuity goes one level deeper: what it honestly means
when Ophiuchus says a piece of context was "preserved," when a declared
condition is "stale," and what those verdicts explicitly do not claim.
What it does
ophiuchus capture compiles a coding agent's task state into a Context
Capsule: the goal, the current state, the repo/branch/commit it was grounded
in, the evidence observed, the hypotheses already rejected, and the requested
next action. ophiuchus send puts that capsule on a relay under a
capability token. ophiuchus receive fetches it on the other side, re-validates
it, and renders it as a handoff the receiving agent can read.
A capsule is not a transcript. Sending the whole session is what Ophiuchus is trying to beat.
Why the rejected hypotheses matter
A normal handoff note carries the goal and the current state. It almost never
carries what was already tried and ruled out — so the next agent or person
re-runs the same dead-end investigation the first one already closed off.
rejected is a first-class capsule field for exactly this reason: the
successor should not have to rediscover a path the predecessor already
disproved.
Early dogfooding is the only evidence so far: one real handoff between two coding agents, on one machine, produced four bug reports. That is not proof this works for anyone else, and not a basis for claiming it saves time or avoids rediscovery — it is evidence worth watching, not a moat or a benchmark claim. Whether a capsule reliably beats a normal handoff note is still being measured.
What the Alpha does not do
- One adapter pair: Claude Code to Codex.
- No hosted relay. The relay that works today is the loopback one you run yourself.
- No accounts, no hosted application, no dashboard.
- No end-to-end encryption, and no search or retrieval over past capsules.
- No durable team memory. A capsule expires.
Access is invite-gated and the repository is private, so there is no public install path. The quickstart says how to ask.
Treat anything you hand to Ophiuchus as leaving your machine once you send it to a relay. There is no end-to-end encryption, and the relay operator can read stored capsules. Do not put credentials, secrets or personal data into a capsule. Privacy and safe use states the full boundary.