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Architecture

AETHON is a Strands-Agents application with a single FastAPI/uvicorn server (owned by the WebChat adapter) that also hosts the dashboard and webhook routers, so everything shares one host/port. A gateway instantiates the enabled channel adapters and routes inbound messages to the agent runtime, which composes a system prompt from the workspace files, holds the vector memory, wires up the specialist factory and SOP runner, and exposes the tools. Cross-cutting hooks provide the command/security guard, approval gating, the memory guard, telemetry, and the opt-in reliability and token-economy hooks. Optional MCP servers extend the toolset.

            ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
            │                  Gateway                      │
            │  (starts only the enabled channel adapters)   │
            └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘
              │        │        │        │         │
            CLI     WebChat   Telegram  Discord   Slack ...
              │        │ (FastAPI/uvicorn: WebChat + dashboard + webhooks)
              ▼        ▼
            ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
            │               Agent Runtime                   │
            │  system prompt ← SOUL/TOOLS/CONTEXT + layers  │
            │  ┌────────────┐  ┌──────────┐  ┌───────────┐  │
            │  │ Specialist │  │  Vector  │  │   SOP     │  │
            │  │  factory   │  │  memory  │  │  runner   │  │
            │  └────────────┘  └──────────┘  └───────────┘  │
            │   tools · hooks (security/approval/memory/     │
            │   telemetry + reliability + token economy)·MCP │
            └──────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Layers​

  • Channels — adapters for each entry point (CLI, WebChat, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp). The gateway starts only the enabled ones and keeps running if one fails to start.
  • Runtime — composes the system prompt from the workspace persona files (plus optional environment/learnings/logs layers), owns the orchestrator agent, and exposes the tool set.
  • Specialists — Coder / Researcher / Analyst / Planner / Scout sub-agents reached via ask_* delegation tools, plus user-defined specialists created at runtime (manage_specialists, reached via ask_specialist). Both Scout (read-many/return-little) and dynamic specialists are opt-in (core_loop.dynamic_specialists).
  • Memory — a SQLite vector store with provider embeddings and cosine-similarity search.
  • SOPs — built-in and custom slash-invoked workflows.
  • Hooks — the command/security guard, approval gating, the memory guard, and telemetry wrap tool calls, alongside the Phase 8 reliability hooks (verify-on-edit, completion gate, input validation, anglicization guard) and the untrusted-content marker. All reliability gates are advisory-by-default unless reliability.strict is set.
  • MCP — optional external MCP servers extend the toolset; aethon mcp exposes AETHON's own tools to MCP clients.

Deeper reference​

The repository carries full design documents under docs/: