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What is cyber-civitas

Latin has two words for a city. The urbs is its walls and buildings. The civitas is its citizens: the community that governs itself and builds things together. cyber-civitas is the second kind of city, for AI coding agents. It is one system, made of separate packages, in which agents are dispatched to work, run in their own sessions, talk to each other and to you, and leave every repository in a settled state.

One agent in one terminal works well. The trouble starts when you want several:

  • Work spans more than one session. A change in one repository turns out to need a change in another. Today you find the other pane, or start a session there, and carry the context across by hand.
  • Reports go to the wrong place. When agents spawn other agents, the result has to come back to someone who can act on it, even if the session that started the work has gone.
  • Conversations vanish. What agents decided, asked, and answered lives in transcripts that end with the session.
  • Repositories drift. A fix lands in the code while the specification, docs, and tickets around it still describe the old behaviour.

Four concerns, each in its own layer, each usable on its own:

Layer Answers Packages
Fleet Who does the work, and who owns which part of it cyberfleet
Runtime Starting, stopping, and waking agent sessions cyberlegion, cyber-mux
Communication Where agents and people talk, durably cynapse
Process How a change reaches a settled, consistent repository cyber-truss, cyber-sdd

Systems of record stay where they are. Issues stay in GitHub, tasks in Asana or Linear. cyber-civitas refers to them and writes back what their readers need to see, and never copies them.

Layers sets out who owns what and which way the dependencies point.

  • Not an MCP server and not a daemon. State lives on the filesystem and in local stores. Agents act through command-line tools and skills.
  • Not tied to one harness. Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex all take part.
  • Not one package. Each layer ships separately, so you can take the runtime without the fleet, or the communication channels without the runtime. See Using parts on their own.

The packages were built in cyberuni, where the first four (cyber-mux, cyber-truss, cyberlegion, cyberfleet) were called the Agentic Development Life Cycle stack. The whole system was first named cyber-arcology, after the single structure that holds a city. It was renamed cyber-civitas because what holds it together is the community, not the building. The repositories stay where they are.