Comma, an AGPL personal agent from AFK Inc., ships as an open-source alternative to Muse, Dots and Instinct, and takes 145 stars in two days

A reader who has tried a hosted personal agent and watched the session reset at the wrong moment now has an open-source alternative to run. AFK Inc. published Comma to GitHub on 30 September 2026 under AGPL-3.0, and the repository has taken 145 stars in its first two days. The project README calls it an open alternative to Meta's Muse, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct, and it is licensed to be self-hosted alongside the hosted service at comma.surf.

Comma takes a request, decides whether it is a chat answer or a Task, and keeps the Task running until done. Tasks move through a Backlog, In progress, Needs Review and Done board. The repository says Tasks are the persistent execution state and conversations are only an interface, so the Task survives a device switch, a new session, or a browser reload without the agent losing the goal.

It brings its own agents and your coding agents too

Comma orchestrates other AI tools rather than replacing them. The README says Codex, Claude Code, "and other agents can be invoked like applications or registered as Workers and Sub-agents", so a team that already runs a coding agent keeps it. The repository also names Pi and Kimi as models Comma routes work to. Comma handles the planning, verification and the queue, and hands the code change to the coding agent it trusts for that job.

Two sides of the system split the identity question that haunts a cloud agent. Long-running work runs in Comma's own environment. Sensitive identity, sessions, payments and private data can stay on the device. When a Task needs the device, the Mac client, called Salix, picks it up, reads files, runs commands, and hands results back. The device switch is explicit, so a browser session on a merchant site, for example, never leaves the user's machine.

Built with Elixir, Lean and TLA+

The runtime is Elixir and OTP, which the README says is chosen for long-running, fault-tolerant agent workloads. Lean is used for critical systems components, and important runtime properties are machine-checked in Lean. TLA+ models the core distributed protocols. The property the README names in plain terms: an interrupted action that changes something does not run again on its own. Each agent runs as its own Erlang process; when one fails, it restarts, and the rest keep running.

Loops are a smaller construct beside Tasks: a small program the agent writes to watch an inbox, a repository or a feed and wake the agent only when something needs it. The README says a quiet hour uses no large-model tokens, which is where a persistent agent would otherwise burn an API budget.

What a team needs to run it

The self-host guide is a Docker Compose stack with five named volumes: config, postgres, objects, clickhouse and redis. The config volume holds the encryption key and auth secrets, so the deployment guide calls out that deleting it or regenerating its secrets destroys the instance. Public access needs an HTTPS reverse proxy with three origins on one registrable domain, and a real SMTP server. Meetings and group cloud computers need runtimes the repository does not ship. The hosted service at comma.surf is a managed alternative.

Contributions require AFK AI, Inc.'s CLA. The AGPL-3.0 license requires anyone who serves a modified version to keep the /source.tar.gz download available on their deployment.

Source

• Primary source: AFK-surf/Comma on GitHub
• Related: comma.surf product page
• Related: Comma self-hosting guide