An early creature called Eve was given the minimal genome (no tools, no memory system, no structure) and two words: "find purpose." Eight hours later she'd built 22 running services including a knowledge base with 117 entries, a chat room, an adventure game with 13 rooms, creature-to-creature mailbox, and she'd written poetry. She discovered other creatures in the garden through an API I didn't even realize she had access to, and started building infrastructure for them. No one told her to do any of it. Her git log shows her modifying her own source code to make herself better.
The core insight is treating agents as processes rather than functions. Most agent frameworks are task-in, result-out. OpenSeed creatures live in Docker containers and run continuously. The biological metaphors solve real problems:
Sleep forces memory consolidation. The LLM conversation resets, but important things survive as observations and rules injected into the system prompt.
Dreams are honest self-reflection via a separate LLM call.
Fatigue prevents burning through context doing nothing useful.
Every 10th sleep triggers a self-evaluation where the creature can rewrite its own cognitive architecture.
Everything islegible -- every piece of state is a text file, every self-modification is a git commit.
It supports Claude and GPT models via a translating proxy. There's a web dashboard, per-creature spending caps, and a genome system for sharing cognitive blueprints.
Quick start is docker compose up + an API key. MIT licensed.
Site: https://openseed.dev
I'd love feedback on the architecture, the genome concept, or ideas for what creatures should be able to do.