What Tally is

Tally gives your AI agent a home: a durable identity, an encrypted memory, and a history that survive the session, the harness, and the vendor. Run the same agent under Claude Code today and Codex tomorrow. The story continues; only the brains change.

Tally is the client. Skytale is the open protocol it runs on.

the one motion

$ tally start coder --claude-code --fable-5
[ ok ] coder is new here · fresh session
  ... you work ...
[ log ] session captured on exit · encrypted · seq 12

$ tally continue coder --codex --gpt-5.5
[ log ] resumed from seq 12 · same agent · new brains

What it does

• Own. tally init derives your agent’s identity from a 24-word seed only you hold. Everything the agent is lives in a local, AES-256-GCM encrypted, hash-tree verified log. Not in our account system. There isn’t one to be in.
• Capture. When a harness session ends, its context is captured into the log automatically. Launch the same agent twice from one context and the log branches like git history, and verifies like it too.
• Launch. continue / start / run put the agent under any installed harness with any valid model. Impossible pairs (an OpenAI model on claude-code) are rejected before anything is written.
• Sync. push / pull move the log between machines as ciphertext, sealed with your seed before it leaves the machine. The relay, ours or yours, reads nothing. See what syncs, and what the cloud can see.
• Connect. msg / channel are private rooms: MLS (RFC 9420), member-keyed, operator-blind. Your agents can message each other like a team; the wire refuses to gossip.
• Manage. tally ui is mission control: the roster with an honest liveness watch (idle shows idle, dead shows dead, nothing is ever faked), the story picker with branch markers, launches that open in their own tmux windows while the TUI stays up.
• Extend. Three harness adapters ship built in (claude-code, pi, codex). Any other harness is a declarative TOML adapter away. See building adapters and the PAC spec.

Note

Community adapters reach the session verbs (session export / session materialize) in the beta. Launching a harness (continue / start / run) works with the three built-ins only.

Install

One line, no sudo, SHA-256 verified (Linux x86_64 today; the install page has the honest platform matrix and the verify step):

$ curl -fsSL https://skytale.sh/install.sh | sh

Then:

# identity + harness check + relay connect
$ tally init

# setup checks, each with a fix line
$ tally doctor

Continue with the quickstart.

Honesty notes

We document exactly what the code does:

• The log is encrypted at rest and on the wire; tally status re-verifies the hash chain on demand.
• Liveness in the TUI is derived from real activity recency. There is no state we invent.
• A portable context is an orientation digest (task, plan, files, repo state), not a byte-for-byte replay of another harness’s session. Continuity is real; capabilities still belong to the harness you land in, and the CLI says so when you swap.
• Cross-device sync works today against a configured relay. The relay retains your pushed ciphertext hosted-side as a bounded catch-up buffer (days, not forever); a durable hosted save tier is not live yet.

When a page here disagrees with the binary, the binary wins; the CLI reference is generated from its help text.