TWO MINUTES, NO SUDO.

NAME

ngent — a resident AI agent that lives on your machine and talks to you over NoidChat. Self-hosted. Not a cloud seat. Not someone else’s server.

SYNOPSIS

$ curl -fsSL https://ngent.noid.gg/install.sh | bash
$ ngent setup     # key · model · pair · auto-boot
$ ngent           # live session in the current folder

RESIDENT / YOUR MACHINE

NGENT installs into ~/.ngent — $HOME-only, no sudo — and becomes part of the machine itself. The installer checksum-verifies its payload before unpacking (fail-closed: a mismatch refuses to install), builds an isolated venv, and registers a systemd --user daemon that boots with the box and restarts on crash.

MODES / TWO FRONT DOORS

Same agent, two front doors — run it as an always-on resident you DM, drop into it live in your terminal, or both.

The daemon is a systemd --user service — auto-starts on boot, auto-restarts on crash, signs into NoidChat as your bot. The ngent terminal command installs even with --terminal-only.

PAIRING / NOIDCHAT · E2EE

Pair once: a QR prints in your terminal, you scan it with the NoidChat app, and your bot gets its own end-to-end-encrypted identity. From then on you just DM it — from anywhere. The identity is saved locally at ~/.ngent/.secrets/ngent/identity.json, so it stays paired.

Pairing is self-service and skippable (--skip-pair); it’s the only step that needs node.

SKILLS / MEMORY · THE RULE OF THREE

The moment your agent does something repeatable, it captures the method. Repetition — not first impulse — earns a skill:

use #1 draft → use #2 pre-graduate → use #3 SKILL

Combos chain skills into one move — download → extract → transcribe becomes a single command.

ARTIFACTS / & RELICS · CRYSTALLIZE

A skill is prose the agent interprets. When a flow is proven on a hot path it crystallizes: each step freezes into an artifact — one job in one executable, typed in → out, sandboxed — and the whole chain becomes a relic that runs solid every time.

prose recipe skill → frozen step artifact → whole flow RELIC

Every request resolves relic → artifact → skill — the most solid tier wins; improvising is the last resort.

MODELS / ANY OPENROUTER MODEL

NGENT talks to its model through OpenRouter — any model it serves (DeepSeek, Claude, GPT, and more) is one id away. Your key is the only credential you bring — written to ~/.ngent/.env (chmod 600), read only by the agent on your box. It never goes to NOID; the one place it ever travels is the model provider you chose, because that is who bills you. Switching models needs no reinstall: pick in ngent setup, from the NoidChat picker, or edit config.yaml → oracle.model.

REQUIREMENTS

OPTIONS / INSTALL FLAGS

--terminal-only  just the local ngent command —
                 no pairing, no daemon
--skip-pair      no NoidChat account; node not needed
--skip-service   no daemon (auto-applied when no
                 systemd --user session exists)

Env: OPENROUTER_API_KEY set before installing skips the key prompt; NGENT_HOME overrides the install dir. Re-running the installer updates in place without clobbering your data.