The Path › Chapter 0 of 9

Welcome to Aither World

what this is, before you install anything

About 5 minutes · for strangers · bricks: awknowledge · awdk · awnix

Teach

Three words you will see everywhere

Aitherium is the company and the platform: the hosted service at aitherium.com, the accounts, the marketplace, the people.

AitherOS is the operating system underneath it — not a Linux you install, but the running fleet of services that gives agents memory, identity, tools and a place to talk. You never have to run AitherOS yourself. Everything in this guide works on your own laptop; the platform is there when you want more.

aw is short for Aither World. Every tool in the family is named as a phrase: awdk is Aither World Dev Kit, awnix is Aither World Nix (a Linux), awsh is Aither World Shell. If a name does not read aloud as "Aither World <something>", it is not one of ours. We call each of these tools a brick — small, standalone, and useful on its own before it is useful together.

What an agent actually is

A chatbot answers. An agent acts: it can run a command, read a file, search the web, send a message, and then decide what to do next based on what happened. The difference is tools. Give a brain tools and a job, and you have an agent.

So an agent is three things:

  • a brain — the model that reads and writes language;
  • tools — functions the brain is allowed to call;
  • a job — what it is for, written down in a small file.

Chapter 4 has you write that file. It is shorter than this page.

The brains are open

Aitherium's own brains are open models you can download and run:

  • The orchestrator model — an open 8-billion-parameter model the platform itself runs on.

It fits on an ordinary laptop.

  • Bonsai — a family of models squeezed to about one bit per weight. Bonsai-27B is

a 27-billion-parameter brain in 3.8 GB, and it runs on a plain CPU with 8 GB of RAM.

"Open" means the numbers that make up the model are published. You can run them with no account, no network, no bill. Chapter 2 does exactly that.

How this guide works

Every chapter from here on has two columns. Teach (left) explains what a thing is and why it exists, in plain words. Do (right) is the exact command to type, what you should see, and what to do if you do not see it. Every chapter ends with one command that proves you finished.

You never need a later chapter to do an earlier one. If you stop after chapter 3 you have a working local brain you can talk to, and that is a fine place to stop.

Do

Nothing yet. Find your terminal:

  • Windows — press the Windows key, type terminal, open Terminal (or PowerShell).
  • macOS — press Cmd+Space, type terminal, open Terminal.
  • Linux — you already know.

Leave it open. Chapter 1 starts there.

What you learned

One estate, 8 doors

These projects are organs of the same system — the same identity plane, the same agent runtime, the same operational discipline. Follow any of them.

the osaitherium.comThe Living OS these four repos are cut from. Open, no login.pythonAither ADKBuild AI agent fleets — 3 lines, any backend, local or cloud.markdownawskillsPortable agent skills — self-contained procedures an agent loads on demand.markdownawknowledgeHow to run a coding agent so the result survives — the laws, with evidence.cudaaitherkvcacheNear-optimal KV cache quantization for LLM inference — sub-byte compression.powershellAitherZeroPowerShell 7+ automation framework — numbered, self-describing scripts.writingThe BlogHow all of it is actually built, measured and operated.pythonawrunA priority-aware queue and dispatcher for agentic runs and ad-hoc CI builds. It also judges whether the runner pool is big enough for the queue it is draining, and can ask a host to grow it -- reserving capacity is zero-sum, so a saturated pool needs more of it, not a different share of it.

The ecosystem this belongs to

Every Aitherium repository publishes an aither-manifest.json beside its page, and each surface reads all of them — so the network is browsable from any node in it.