The Path › Chapter 5 of 9

Agent packs

a whole agent in one command

About 15 minutes · for hands-ons · bricks: awdk · awskills · awpack

Teach

What a pack is

A pack is an agent you did not write. Someone — maybe Aitherium, maybe another user — built a complete agent with brain settings, tools, and a job, and published it so you can have it in one line.

You already met packs: Bonsai in chapter 2 is a pack (it comes as a container), and the "tools" chapter 4 talks about are tools that packs bring with them.

The pack you will try

OpenClaw is a research agent — it searches the web, gathers sources, cites them, and builds a knowledge graph so you can ask follow-up questions and it remembers context across them. Research agents without your own tools are useful, but the ones with tools are agents: they can act (search, retrieve, synthesize) instead of just guessing.

Where packs come from

Right now, packs ship inside awdk. When you pip install awdk, you get a bundled catalog of packs — free ones like the Orchestrator, and paid tiers like Hydra (testing and QA). The packs live inside the kit.

The awpack public registry is being built. When it ships, this page will change to "go to the marketplace, browse, pick one, install". Until then, the bundled set is what you have.

The difference between packs and skills

A skill is smaller — one procedure. Research a question, send an email, approve a decision. Skills live in awskills (https://aitherium.github.io/awskills/) and are used by agents to do specific jobs. A pack is a whole agent; a skill is one thing an agent can do. Think of a pack as a person and a skill as a technique that person knows.

Do

1
bash
adk packs

You should see: Available Agent Packs - a short table (analyst, claude-code, code-discipline, gobbonet, hermes, openclaw) and Install with: adk install pack:<name>

If not: An empty table means the kit did not install completely. pip install --force-reinstall awdk restores the bundled packs.

2
bash
adk install pack:openclaw

You should see: Installing openclaw... then Installed to: <a folder in your home directory> and Next steps

If not: The name must match a row from adk packs exactly - pack:openclaw, lower case.

3
bash
adk run --agents openclaw

You should see: Starting AitherADK fleet server - agents: openclaw, port: 8080 - the pack's agent is now serving; Ctrl+C stops it

If not: If port 8080 is busy, add --port 8081. If it says the agent is unknown, the install step did not finish - read its last line.

Check you are done

bash
adk run --agents openclaw

You should see: Starting AitherADK fleet server - agents: openclaw

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.