Outline

Zero dependencies: an agent engine you can read in an afternoon

The engine behind the Office uses no third-party packages. Here is why we made that trade, what it cost us, and what it buys the people who run it on their own machines.

Manelink ResearchOutline. The full engineering note is in progress.

What this engineering note will cover

  • The trade: no third-party packages in the engine
  • What we had to write ourselves instead
  • What it buys the people who run it on their own machine
  • Where the approach will stop, and what we will do then

The trade we made

The engine runs on Node alone. There is no package tree to install, update or audit, and no database or service to stand up before it starts.

What it cost us

Every small piece a package would have given us, we wrote and now maintain. The note will list those pieces and what each one took.

What it buys you

An engine small enough to read, files that sit on your own disk, and nothing that changes underneath you because someone else published an update.

Where it stops

No choice holds forever. We will say where we expect this one to strain, and how we would change course without giving up what it buys.