Provider-agnostic kernel
The kernel speaks the Chaos-ABI; adapters translate to each provider’s wire format. OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Z.ai, Ollama, or anything OpenAI-compatible - a new provider is a config entry, not a rebuild. Learn more.
FreeChaOS
Free software to command the Agents of ChaOS. Not a coding assistant - an OS. Any provider, modular capabilities, MCP drivers.
FreeChaOS is an AI agent operating system. You pick the brain (OpenAI, Anthropic, local models), snap in the capabilities you need (modules), and wire up external services (drivers). Forked from OpenAI’s Codex CLI after one too many bugs were called features. The project name is FreeChaOS; the binary is chaos - same pattern as GNU/Linux.
Drivers over MCP
MCP servers are the device drivers: file access, shell, Telegram, GitHub. FreeChaOS is a full MCP client and server, so it plugs into other harnesses too. Learn more.
Runs on a Celeron
~80 MB of RAM in MCP mode, ~128 MB in TUI mode. If it can’t run on a Core 2 Duo with 1 GB of RAM, it’s out of tree.
Abuses every security primitive
landlock + seccomp on Linux, capsicum on FreeBSD, pledge/unveil on OpenBSD, sandbox profiles on macOS. No shims, no compatibility layers. Windows is not supported.
Free software
Apache-2.0. No telemetry, no phone home, no update checker. Free as in GNU freedom - not “open” in the OpenAI sense.
Scriptable in Lua
Halluacinate lets you register new tools, hooks, and a custom statusline by dropping a Lua script in a folder. No recompiling. Learn more.
Capabilities
Section titled “Capabilities”Architecture
Kernel talks to LLM providers, modules extend what ChaOS can do, drivers connect it to the world. Learn more.
Providers
Four wire formats (Responses, Chat Completions, Anthropic Messages, TensorZero) with auto-detection and fallback. Learn more.
MCP client & server
Tools, resources, prompts, sampling, elicitation, roots, logging, tasks - the full protocol, both directions. Learn more.
Halluacinate
Sandboxed Lua tools, event hooks, and a Doom-style HUD statusline you can override. Learn more.
HTTP trigger server
chaos serve turns the agent into a webhook target: one request, one process, one response. Learn more.
Comparison
How FreeChaOS stacks up against Claude Code and OpenAI Codex CLI. Learn more.
Get started
Section titled “Get started”The Quickstart walks through installing chaos, pointing it at a provider, and running your first session.