The complete tool-dependency declaration for AgentOps. This is the canonical detail — the README "Requirements" section and the shared skill fallback table summarize it.
AgentOps is designed to degrade gracefully. Almost everything is optional: skills check for a tool before using it and fall back when it is absent (the contract is in skills/shared/SKILL.md "CLI Availability Pattern"). Only an agent runtime plus git is genuinely required to get value.
| Tool | Class | Purpose | Required? | Fallback if absent |
|---|---|---|---|---|
agent runtime (claude / codex / opencode) |
REQUIRED | The coding harness AgentOps sits on top of. At least one is needed — AgentOps adds bookkeeping, gates, and a corpus to it. | Required (one of) | None — AgentOps has nothing to drive without a runtime. The installer warns and points at the install links. |
git |
REQUIRED | Version control; .agents/ state lives next to your code, worktrees isolate parallel work, provenance ties artifacts to commits. |
Required | None — the SDLC control plane assumes a git repo. |
ao |
REQUIRED (recommended) | The AgentOps CLI: repo-native bookkeeping, retrieval (ao inject/ao lookup), health (ao doctor), the ao rpi loops, validation gates. |
Strongly recommended | Skills still guide the workflow, but the knowledge flywheel, gates, and loops that need the binary are unavailable. Write learnings to .agents/learnings/ by hand. |
br + bv (beads_rust) |
TRACKING | Offline, git-JSONL-backed issue tracking (_beads/issues.jsonl) plus graph-aware triage. The mandatory task-tracking surface for non-trivial work. |
Required for tracked work in this repo | Use the harness task list / plain markdown only for trivial or untracked work. Install/use br for persistent issue tracking. |
legacy bd / Dolt tracker |
HISTORICAL | Retired AgentOps tracker backend retained only for migration records and historical runbooks. | Not required | Do not use for current AgentOps work; route through BEADS_DIR=$PWD/_beads br .... |
out-of-session substrate (ntm / ao agent / MCP) |
ORCHESTRATION | Runs whole ao rpi loops out of session — an NTM tmux swarm, managed-agents via ao agent, or the MCP tool surface (ao mcp serve). AgentOps owns none of it; it adopts a substrate, the way it adopts br. |
Optional (out-of-session only) | Run the loop in-session yourself (/rpi, /evolve). The substrate adds only always-on orchestration. |
gh (GitHub CLI) |
PR / CI | Open and manage PRs, query CI status, drive the ship/merge flow. | Optional | Open PRs through the web UI; skip automated PR/merge steps. |
go |
BUILD-FROM-SOURCE | Toolchain to build cli/bin/ao from source (go 1.26, per cli/go.mod). |
Optional | Install a prebuilt ao via Homebrew, the install script, or release binaries — no Go needed. |
jq |
UTILITY | Parse --json output from ao, br, and gh in scripts and dispatch loops. |
Optional | Read JSON manually or use non-JSON output modes; some script automations are unavailable. |
rg (ripgrep) |
UTILITY | Fast code/corpus search used by research and several scripts. | Optional | Falls back to grep/git grep; slower but functional. |
curl |
UTILITY | Fetch the installer and release assets during install. | Required only for curl-pipe install | Download release binaries manually or install via Homebrew. |
openssl |
UTILITY | Hashing/randomness in some scripts (e.g. openssl dgst); paired with the sha256 tools. |
Optional | sha256sum/shasum cover the hashing path; most flows do not need openssl. |
sha256sum / shasum -a 256 |
UTILITY | Verify download integrity and compute content hashes (codex artifact hashes, install checksums). | Optional | Either tool satisfies the need; scripts detect whichever is present. |
tmux |
UTILITY | Session multiplexing for streamed/long-running RPI runs and an NTM agent swarm's sessions. | Optional | RPI runs in non-tmux modes; a managed-agents substrate needs no local tmux. |
cass |
UTILITY | Session-history search (ao search upstream backend). |
Optional | Skip transcript search. Note: "install cass for session history." |
awk, bash |
UTILITY | Shell plumbing the scripts and ao doctor checks rely on. |
Effectively always present | POSIX baseline; present on every supported platform. |
- Health check.
ao doctorprobes the tools it depends on (ao,awk,bash,br,cass,git,tmux) and reports what is missing without failing the workflow. - Install helpers.
scripts/install.shdetects package managers (brew,apt/apt-get,dnf/yum,pacman,zypper) and runtimes (claude,codex,opencode) and adapt; nothing here is hard-required beyondcurlfor the curl-pipe path. - Out-of-session vs in-session. The only orchestration dependency is an out-of-session substrate (NTM / managed-agents / MCP), and it is strictly out-of-session and optional. In-session, an agent runtime +
git(+ao/brrecommended) is the whole stack. See docs/3.0.md. - Graceful degradation is a contract, not a courtesy. Every skill that shells out to an optional tool must check availability first and inform the user what was skipped — see the shared fallback table.