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FrontierAgent

FrontierAgent is an open-source agent runtime, terminal product, and evaluation suite for long-horizon research and file-based work. The frontier-agent TUI ships two native workflows:

• ReAct — one stateful agent researches, reads files, writes deliverables, runs commands, and iterates in a task-scoped sandbox.
• Agent Team — a coordinator maintains a task board, delegates independent work to parallel sub-agents, collects their reports, and synthesizes the result.

The same workflow engine powers the benchmark runner used to evaluate Apodex models. The framework, tools, workflows, and evaluation layer remain separate, so each can be reused independently.

Want to try FrontierAgent without hosting a model?

Apodex-1.1 is available through the Apodex API Platform. Get an API key, connect its OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and start running FrontierAgent in minutes.

New here? Use the documentation index to find the right installation, SGLang, workflow, evaluation, or developer guide.

Highlights

• Native Agent Team workflow. The coordinator decomposes the request, dispatches bounded parallel assignments, receives structured reports, and can use an optional fast reporter for final evidence review.
• Task Board. Agent Team's add_task and update_task events appear live in the TUI sidebar with pending, active, completed, blocked, and cancelled state.
• Sandboxed file work. Shell and file tools share one task-scoped filesystem: /inputs is read-only, /workspace is working state, and /outputs contains persistent deliverables. Authorization and sandbox failures are fail-closed.
• Asynchronous intervention. Type while an agent is running to queue a new instruction. It is injected at the next safe turn boundary without discarding the active run. In Agent Team mode it steers the coordinator; already-running sub-agents are allowed to finish.
• Transparent deliverables. On macOS/Docker, /outputs maps to .apodex/runs/<session-id>/outputs on the host. The same run directory also contains its checkpoint, trace, engine log, and trajectories.
• Approval, trace, and recovery. Mutating operations show a diff and require approval unless --yes is enabled. Sessions are checkpointed, every action is traced locally, /revert restores session changes, and --resume continues a saved run.
• Evaluation included. The subprocess runner supports research and file-grounded benchmarks, deterministic artifact collection, concurrency, progress inspection, and rerunning individual failures.

Conceptual Agent Team workflow, from task delegation and asynchronous report collection to verification and final synthesis.

How it fits together

flowchart LR
    U["User / benchmark task"] --> TUI["TUI or subprocess runner"]
    TUI --> R["Stateful ReAct"]
    TUI --> C["Agent Team coordinator"]
    C --> B["Task board"]
    B --> S1["Sub-agent 1"]
    B --> S2["Sub-agent 2"]
    B --> SN["Sub-agent N"]
    R --> FS["Task sandbox"]
    S1 --> FS
    S2 --> FS
    SN --> FS
    FS --> I["/inputs (read-only)"]
    FS --> W["/workspace (working files)"]
    FS --> O["/outputs (deliverables)"]
    S1 --> C
    S2 --> C
    SN --> C
    C --> A["Final answer / report"]
    R --> A

The repository boundaries are intentional:

frontier_agent/  generic loop, scheduling, registries, AgentBus, observers
plugins/tools/   web, shell, file, sandbox, and team tool implementations
workflows/       ReAct and Agent Team pipelines, profiles, prompts, observers
apodex/          terminal CLI/TUI, approvals, sessions, traces, and Docker path
benchmarks/      public benchmark harness plus standalone FrontierSearchBench

More detail: framework architecture, Agent Team, and Stateful ReAct. See run artifacts and timestamps for the on-disk layout.

Quick start

Requirements: Git, Python 3.12, uv, and an OpenAI-compatible model endpoint. Docker is optional.

git clone https://github.com/ApodexAI/FrontierAgent.git
cd FrontierAgent

uv sync --python 3.12 --extra dev
cp .env.example .env

Add your endpoint to .env:

OPENAI_API_KEY=your-key
OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://your-openai-compatible-endpoint/v1
OPENAI_MODEL=your-model-name

# Optional web research tools
SERPER_API_KEY=
JINA_API_KEY=

Start the TUI:

# Stateful single-agent workflow
uv run frontier-agent --mode react --cwd /path/to/project

# Coordinator plus parallel sub-agents
uv run frontier-agent --mode agent_team --cwd /path/to/project

uv sync above installs the lightweight terminal runtime. Scientific and document packages are intentionally optional in native mode; the agent installs only what a task actually needs into <project>/.apodex/runtime/native. The apodex command is retained as a compatibility alias.

Prefer a script that does all of the above? ./scripts/run-macos.sh and ./scripts/run-linux.sh set up a hosted-endpoint install, and ./scripts/run-linux-gpu.sh --install-system-deps --setup-only prepares a native, isolated SGLang environment on a Linux NVIDIA GPU. The step-by-step equivalent is the endpoint quickstart (中文教程), which requires neither model self-hosting nor Docker.

Local SGLang serving is pinned to reviewed NVIDIA driver / CUDA / SGLang tracks, and a mismatch surfaces late as opaque CUDA or Triton kernel errors during model load. Confirm your nvidia-smi driver against the GPU compatibility matrix before choosing an image tag or native pin. The GPU helper selects a reviewed userspace track from the host driver, but never installs or replaces the driver itself.

Deployment model

The operating system, FrontierAgent runtime, and model runtime are independent choices. “NVIDIA” describes the local model service, not how the agent itself runs. Unsure which applies to your machine or GPU provider? Start with the installation chooser.

Chinese-speaking macOS users can use the macOS 中文安装与一键启动指南.

Containers and local models

Pre-built linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 images are published to the GitHub Container Registry, so no local Python environment is needed:

cp .env.example .env
docker compose run --rm agent

• Run FrontierAgent in Docker — Compose, image pinning, direct docker run, and EC2/ECS deployment.
• Docker SGLang on a Linux NVIDIA host — two containers on one network; SGLang owns the GPU.
• Native SGLang without nested Docker — for managed GPU environments that forbid a nested daemon.
• SGLang configuration reference — every .env.sglang variable, token-budget invariants, and tuning order. Production 35B templates for RTX 4090, RTX 5090, and two-GPU hosts live under config/sglang/.

Using the TUI

Run without a task for an interactive session, or pass one and stay in the session for follow-ups:

uv run frontier-agent --mode agent_team --cwd /repo \
  "Research the alternatives, verify the evidence, and write a report"

# One-shot, line mode, or resume a saved session
uv run frontier-agent --mode react --cwd /repo -p "explain src/main.py"
uv run frontier-agent --mode agent_team --no-tui "compare these implementations"
uv run frontier-agent --resume

# Attach read-only documents before the TUI starts (repeatable)
uv run frontier-agent --mode react --cwd /repo \
  --input ~/Downloads/claim.pdf --input ~/Desktop/photo.jpg

The sidebar carries the plan/task board, live tool activity, deliverables, and a session-scoped diff. While a workflow is busy, typing a follow-up queues it for the next safe turn boundary rather than interrupting the run.

For the four sidebar tabs, previews, approvals, attachments, clipboard support, keys, and Agent Team live steering, see the TUI user guide (中文使用教程). The full slash-command, option, and theming reference is apodex/README.md.

Workflow modes

Agent Team parallelism is additional to benchmark concurrency. When evaluating, start with --concurrency 1; total simultaneous model calls can approach runner concurrency multiplied by the team spawn limit.

Set SWARM_NO_WEB=1 to disable Agent Team web tools or REACT_NO_WEB=1 for closed-book ReAct tasks.

Filesystem and security model

File and shell tools share this one task sandbox and path policy. Interactive sessions add an approval gate on writes, deletion, package installation, and risky shell commands; some operations stay denied even with --yes; and file mutations are journaled so /revert can undo them.

Details: sandboxing and path policy, approval and trace behavior, and the security policy.

Development

uv sync --frozen --extra sandbox --extra document-readers --extra eval --extra dev
uv run pytest -q
uv run ruff check .

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full development environment, pre-flight checks, session debugging, and submission process. Building the container image is covered in Run FrontierAgent in Docker.

Benchmark evaluation

The evaluation harness runs each benchmark question in an isolated subprocess, supports resumable multi-run experiments, and dispatches benchmark-specific deterministic or model-based judges. A minimal smoke run, once the datasets are downloaded per the evaluation guide, is:

uv sync --extra eval --extra sandbox --extra document-readers
uv run python -m benchmarks.public.runner.run_subprocess \
  --benchmark browsecomp --pipeline stateful-react-agent --profile default \
  --limit 1 --concurrency 1 --out ./results/smoke

The evaluation guide is the canonical operator reference for credentials, judge preflight, datasets, file benchmarks, execution, and result inspection. The benchmark registry lists dataset keys, default pipelines, scoring implementations, and extension points. FrontierSearchBench has its own external scorer and an isolation requirement, so it is documented separately in FrontierSearchBench evaluation.

Supported benchmarks

BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, xbench-DeepResearch, Humanity's Last Exam (text-only), SuperChem, FrontierScience-Research, FrontierScience-Olympiad, DeepSearchQA, WideSearch, FrontierSearchBench, OfficeQA, GDPval, APEX, and OneMillion-Bench.

GDPval uses deterministic deliverable validation in this open-source harness; the agentic pairwise grader is intentionally excluded. The benchmark registry is authoritative for each dataset key, its default pipeline, and its scoring implementation.

Apodex-1.1 performance

The chart above compares the two FrontierAgent workflows with the Apodex-1.0 baseline and selected external systems. The Apodex results are summarized here:

Earlier Apodex-1.0 checkpoints remain available in the Hugging Face collection, with model cards and serving guidance.

Citation

Cite the current release:

@techreport{apodex11,
  title  = {Apodex-1.1: Scaling Agentic Intelligence for Complex Work},
  author = {Apodex Team},
  year   = {2026}
}

For work that refers specifically to the previous generation:

@techreport{apodex10,
  title  = {Apodex-1.0: A Verification-Centric Agent Team for Discoverative Intelligence},
  author = {Apodex Team},
  year   = {2026}
}

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.