Introduction

Synapse Agent is an open-source AI agent built by Josh Research under the MIT License. It runs in your terminal, executes real work through tools, and improves through a closed learning loop. Where most agents start from zero every morning, Synapse is designed to remember you — your projects, your preferences, your workflows — and get measurably better at your work the longer you use it.

The learning loop

Most agents reset every session. Synapse is designed to compound: it creates skills from experience, improves them during use, nudges itself to persist knowledge, searches its own past conversations, and builds a deeper model of who you are across sessions.

• Agent-curated memory with periodic nudges to persist knowledge
• Autonomous skill creation after complex tasks — skills self-improve during use
• FTS5 session search with LLM summarization for cross-session recall
• Honcho dialectic user modeling across conversations
• Compatible with the agentskills.io open standard

The loop looks like this: every task produces experience → experience is curated into memory and skills → skills improve future execution → better execution produces more experience. Nothing about it is a side feature — the loop is the core identity of the product, and it runs by default, not behind a flag.

Key properties

• Real terminal interface — full TUI with multiline editing, slash-command autocomplete, conversation history, interrupt-and-redirect, streaming tool output
• Provider agnostic — OpenRouter, OpenAI, custom endpoints, and many other providers. Switch with synapse model
• Lives where you do — Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, Email, and CLI through a single gateway process
• Runs anywhere — seven terminal backends: local, Docker, SSH, Singularity, Modal, Daytona, Vercel Sandbox
• Scheduled automations — built-in cron scheduler with delivery to any platform
• Delegates and parallelizes — isolated subagents for parallel workstreams

What Synapse is not

Being honest about scope is part of the design. Synapse is not a hosted SaaS — there is no account, no cloud brain, no vendor lock-in. It is software you run on hardware you control, with API keys you own. Memory recall is retrieval-based search over stored history, not magic: useful context in, better answers out.

Architecture at a glance

Where to next

Head to Installation for verified install commands per platform, or Quick Start for the four-step setup flow. If something breaks, Troubleshooting covers the common fixes per category.