docs / overview
Documentation
Wombat is a general-purpose agent that runs in your terminal. One binary, no runtime, and a harness built around doing the whole job: edit, run, verify, browse, research, and hand back when it is done.
What ships in the box
The default experience is a chat UI with a framed inspector, a live footer and a command palette. Under it is a single agent loop with a small tool registry that grows only when the task needs more reach.
| area | what you get |
|---|---|
| Editing | Read, write, edit and atomic multi-file patches, with exact-bytes handling for CRLF and UTF-8 files. |
| Shell | bash with a 30s default timeout for foreground work, background jobs, and a guard that rejects searches outside the workspace. |
| Git | bash git. Dedicated git tools were removed, and checkpoints use a private shadow repo. |
| Verification | verify, the browser tool, and project checks; a writer's patch must pass checks before it merges. |
| Web | Search across several engines, page fetch with readable-text extraction, and image search — loaded as capabilities, not always-on. |
| Research | Quick, standard and deep modes with soft budgets and a hard ceiling, plus one bounded extension request. |
| Fleet | Lead plus scouts and writers in git worktrees, a dependency-graph plan scheduler, and resumable workers. |
| Sessions | Resumable JSONL transcripts scoped to a directory, checkpoints you can restore, and project references. |
| MCP | Local stdio and remote HTTP/SSE servers, per-server permission gates, and OAuth with PKCE and token refresh. |
| Agents | Custom specialists with their own prompt, tools, permissions, MCP servers, skills and model. |
Start here
getting started
Install, run setup, and get a first task done.
open guide → 02configuration
Providers, models, permissions, paths and the config file.
open guide → 03tools & profiles
The nine-tool coding profile, capability loading and research budgets.
open guide → 04agents & orchestration
Custom agents, the plan scheduler, worktrees and review.
open guide → 05mcp servers
stdio and HTTP servers, OAuth, tool naming and gates.
open guide → 06cli reference
Every command, slash command, key binding and theme.
open guide → 07troubleshooting
The failures people actually hit, and the fix for each.
open guide →The shape of the harness
Three ideas explain most of the behaviour you will see, including the benchmark numbers on the comparison page.
1. Tools are a budget, not a feature list
Every exposed tool contributes its JSON schema to every request. When Wombat exposed 38–39
tools, roughly 71% of the first prompt was tool schemas. The default coding
profile now exposes nine, and tool_search /
request_capability let the model pull in web, semantic, verify or media tools
mid-run. See tools & profiles.
2. Research is bounded
A research loop that never ends is worse than a slightly shallow answer. Quick mode allows two searches and one fetch, standard five and three, deep ten and six, each with a hard ceiling. When the soft budget is spent, the next call returns "synthesize now" instead of another page.
3. Parallel work is explicit
The lead plans a ledger, scouts and writers run in isolated worktrees, dependent steps receive upstream reports, and a patch must pass its checks before merge. Nothing about the fleet is implicit: if the plan has one step, the run is one agent. See agents & orchestration.
Version and status
The latest tag is v0.2.6; main carries the unreleased work
covered here — custom agents, the skills browser, capability profiles, bounded research,
nine-tool coding profile, and the rebuilt opentui interface. Where this site says
"current", it means main after that tag.
wombat version
wombat doctor
wombat config