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KARMAX is an orchestration daemon. It holds no model of its own: it routes events to an agent, gives that agent tools, remembers what happened, and runs things on a schedule.

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The pieces

Everything that happens is an event in a durable log, with per-subscriber offsets. A subscriber that was down does not lose what arrived while it was down; one that crashes mid-handle sees the event again. Delivery is at-least-once, and anything that fails repeatedly is dead-lettered rather than retried forever in silence.A new subscriber starts at the HEAD of the log, not at zero. Starting at zero once re-delivered 1,461 historical WhatsApp messages on a restart.
One agent per configured identity, with a mailbox per conversation — ordered within a chat, concurrent across chats. It has a main model, a cheaper memory model for retrieval, and a summary model for compaction.
The universal currency. Everything an integration offers, everything the agent can do, and everything a sandboxed workflow can reach is a tool with a name and a JSON schema. The agent calls them, workflows call them through one host function, and the Broker gates them by name.
Decides what an extension may do and meters what it did. Default deny: a subject with no grants is refused everything. See the capability model.
GitLoom when configured, SQLite when not. One store, never both — two stores that can disagree is a worse failure than one that can be down, because the disagreement is silent.
Three tiers, in order of how much they can do: recipes (a YAML file), signed WASM workflows (sandboxed code with a manifest), and compiled-in loops (first-party, full authority). Durable runs, retries and step checkpointing come from the loop runtime, so no tier reimplements them.
Durable timers. “Continue on Thursday” is a row, not a goroutine, so it survives a restart.

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How a message becomes an action

1

A channel receives it

WhatsApp via a wacli webhook, Slack over its socket, Telegram by polling. Each channel decides in Go — not by asking a model — whether KARMAX was addressed, because that decides whether it speaks at all.
2

It becomes an event

comms.message, appended to the durable log.
3

It reaches a mailbox

Routed to the agent’s mailbox for that conversation. Messages in one chat are handled in order; different chats run concurrently.
4

The agent takes a turn

With dynamic context: the time, your profile, open review questions, active coding sessions, available channels, and memory retrieved for this message.
5

It acts

Its own tools for what it can do directly; claude_code.call for work that needs a shell, files or research. Anything long runs in the background and comes back later as a delegation.completed event.

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The rules the code follows

Tools are the currency. Adding an integration adds tools. It does not add a host function, an ABI, or a special case in the sandbox. This is why WhatsApp went from six bespoke host functions to zero. Untrusted content is fenced or defanged at the boundary. Anything somebody else wrote — a WhatsApp message, a GitHub comment — is neutralised where it enters, not where it is used. A loop author cannot forget. A failure is reported where somebody will see it. A tool that fails returns that failure to the model, which can adapt. A credential that dies shows up in karmax integrations before something depends on it. Nothing that matters is only in memory. Runs, timers, offsets, credentials and loop state are rows. A restart resumes rather than forgets.