About Obelus

Obelus is an independent desktop AI agent built from the open-source Goose foundation. It runs locally and supports research, writing, coding, automation, data analysis, and tool-enabled workflows through a native Electron app and Rust backend.

The product is being shaped around constructive skepticism: make evidence visible, communicate uncertainty clearly, and question claims without turning scrutiny into spectacle. The current application retains Goose's mature general-agent capabilities while the Obelus product direction develops. It does not yet claim to provide automatic live verification of spoken conversations.

Run the desktop app locally

Prerequisites on macOS are Apple Command Line Tools and the repository-managed Hermit environment.

source ./bin/activate-hermit
cargo build --release -p goose-cli --bin goose
just run-ui

The desktop app intentionally keeps the proven goose backend binary and protocol-level interfaces internally. Public app identity, storage, deep links, visual design, and packaging belong to Obelus.

Repository boundary

This public repository contains the Obelus desktop client, its embedded Rust agent, and versioned public interoperability contracts. The managed research gateway, administrator console, deployment configuration, and provider credentials are maintained in a separate private cloud repository.

The split does not remove hosted-research support from the client. Desktop builds connect to a configured gateway over its versioned HTTPS API; they do not embed cloud implementation code or service credentials. Fact-check contract V2 is distributed from contracts/fact-check/v2.

Public workflows run generic CI and supply-chain checks or create manually requested build artifacts. Registry publishing, updater releases, documentation deployment, and repository-writing bots remain disabled until Obelus owns and reviews each destination.

Build a macOS app

source ./bin/activate-hermit
just package-ui

The packaged Apple Silicon application is written to ui/desktop/out/Obelus-darwin-arm64/Obelus.app.

Development

# Rust workspace
cargo build
cargo test -p goose
cargo fmt --check

# Desktop renderer
cd ui/desktop
pnpm run typecheck
pnpm run test:run
pnpm run format:check

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the Obelus development and compatibility workflow and ui/desktop/README.md for desktop details.

Brand system

Production-ready logos, licensed fonts, status icons, and interface assets live in ui/desktop/src/assets/brand, with native app icons in ui/desktop/src/images. The larger design-source and export package is maintained separately so the public client repository contains only assets used by builds.

Compatibility and attribution

Obelus preserves selected Goose names in internal crates, environment variables, ACP/MCP messages, project hints, and the embedded backend where changing them would break compatibility. User data, credentials, app identity, analytics, and update channels remain isolated from Goose.

This project is licensed under Apache 2.0 and retains the original Goose copyright and attribution. External Goose documentation is an upstream compatibility reference, not Obelus documentation.