# Manifold
Manifold is an **experimental** platform for long-horizon workflow automation with teams of AI assistants.
It supports OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic models, along with OpenAI-compatible APIs for self-hosted open-weight models served through [llama.cpp](https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp) or [vLLM](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm).
> [!WARNING]
> Manifold is an experimental frontier AI platform. Do not deploy it in production environments that require strong stability guarantees unless this README explicitly states otherwise.
## What Manifold does
Manifold is built for workflows that go beyond one-shot prompts. It gives you a workspace where specialists, tools, projects, and workflows can work together on multi-step objectives over extended periods.
## Features
### Agent chat
Use a traditional chat interface to assign objectives to specialists. Agent specialists can be configured to render visualizations in addition to text responses.
_Specialists can collaborate across multiple turns. Manifold is designed to take advantage of the long-horizon capabilities of frontier models and can work on complex objectives for hours._
### Image generation
Manifold supports image generation with OpenAI and Google models, as well as local image generation through a custom ComfyUI MCP client.
_Example ComfyUI-generated image using a custom workflow._
### Observability (work in progress)
### Pulse - Scheduled Tasks
Schedule tasks for agent specialists to execute in time intervals, daily, or only once at a defined date and time. Send results to various external services. Matrix is natively supported, but Skills or MCP's can extend the channels Manifold has access to.
### Workflow editor
Design agent workflows with a visual flow editor. __MCP tools are exposed as nodes automagically. Saved workflows become tools that can be invoked by specialists or inserted as nodes into other workflows.__ It's workflows all the way down.
### Specialist registry
Define and configure AI agents, then build your own team of experts.
### Projects
Configure projects as agent workspaces.
Each project is isolated to its own root path. Agents load project skills from that project's `skills/` folder, and can also discover universal read-only skills from `$HOME/.manifold/skills` and `$HOME/.agents/skills` through dedicated skill tools.
### Integrated tools and MCP support
Manifold includes built-in tools for agent workflows and supports MCP to extend agent capabilities. You can configure multiple MCP servers and enable tools individually to manage context size more precisely.
### Prompts, datasets, and experiments playground
Create, iterate on, and version prompts that can be assigned to agents. Configure datasets and run experiments to understand how prompt changes affect agent behavior.
## Deploy a fresh clone
The recommended first-run path is Docker-based and does **not** require a local Go, Node, or `pnpm` toolchain.
### Prerequisites
For a basic local deployment, you need:
- Docker with Docker Compose support
- An LLM API key or a reachable OpenAI-compatible endpoint
- A writable host directory to use as `WORKDIR`
Optional local tooling is only needed if you are developing Manifold itself:
- Node 22 and `pnpm` for running the frontend outside Docker
- Go 1.26.3 for local binary builds
- Chrome or another Chromium-compatible browser if you plan to use browser-driven tools from a host build
### Fast path
```bash
cp example.env .env
cp config.yaml.example config.yaml
# Edit .env and set at minimum:
# OPENAI_API_KEY=...
# WORKDIR=/absolute/path/to/your/manifold-workdir
docker compose up -d manifold
```
Then open <http://localhost:32180>.
### Self-contained host run
Manifold can run without external database or telemetry services when you build the `manifold` binary locally. SQLite is the default durable backend, and Postgres is optional:
```yaml
databases:
backend: sqlite
defaultDSN: ""
sqlite:
path: "~/.manifold/manifold.db"
obs:
otlp: ""
local:
enabled: true
clickhouse:
dsn: ""
```
Check local storage before startup with:
```bash
./dist/manifold storage doctor --json
```
With that configuration, `manifold` stores durable state in SQLite with FTS5 and Vec1 enabled, and serves metrics, logs, and traces from bounded process-local telemetry. You still need an LLM provider, which can be a remote API key or a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
For the full deployment walkthrough, see:
- [QUICKSTART.md](./QUICKSTART.md)
- [docs/deployment.md](./docs/deployment.md)
- [docs/matrix-gateway.md](./docs/matrix-gateway.md)
- [docs/video-generation.md](./docs/video-generation.md)
## Developers
### Frontend feature gates
`make build-manifold` is the standard host build for Manifold. It builds `dist/manifold` with the Forge backend, embedded frontend, and stable UI feature gate. Stable builds do render frontend undocumented features still in active development.
To build the same backend and embedded frontend with beta UI links enabled, use either command:
```bash
make build-manifold-beta
make build-manifold FEATURE_GATE=beta
```
The build passes `FEATURE_GATE` through to Vite as `VITE_MANIFOLD_FEATURE_GATE`.
### Release packages
Release artifacts are zip files that contain the runtime `manifold` binary and the example configuration files needed to bootstrap a deployment:
- `manifold` or `manifold.exe`
- `config.yaml.example`
- `specialists.yaml.example`
- `mcp.yaml.example`
- `example.env`
- `THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt`
The `agent` one-shot CLI and `openapi` generator are developer tools and are not required for the Manifold server, UI, or API runtime.
### Forge harness
Standard Manifold builds use the Forge backend. The stricter guarded harness modes for workflow enforcement, tool-error recovery, and control-flow-safe compaction are still controlled by runtime configuration. See [docs/forge_harness.md](./docs/forge_harness.md) for modes, configuration, rollout guidance, and deterministic scenario tests.