Athena

Athena supplies portable, architecture-first skills for repository review, development, and orchestration. It gives each coding harness the same trusted, evidence-based workflow. It does not require a host-specific runtime.

Athena is available only as a coding-harness skill and plugin package. It does not publish a Python wheel, a source distribution, or a runtime library.

Technical English

All Athena English technical prose must follow the ASD-STE100 technical-English policy. This rule is for skill sources, the engineering principles catalog, and prose that a skill produces. Literal text does not have to obey this rule.

The current official ASD-STE100 standard is the complete authority. Athena checks do not certify conformance to the standard.

Repository integrations

Athena has two repository integrations:

Purpose	Default	Owner override	Checkout
Knowledge	HomericIntelligence/Mnemosyne	HOMERIC_INTELLIGENCE_MNEMOSYNE_OWNER	$HOME/.agent_brain/knowledge
Automation	HomericIntelligence/Hephaestus	HOMERIC_INTELLIGENCE_HEPHAESTUS_OWNER	$HOME/.agent_brain/automation

Read-only Mnemosyne use is local-first under the dependency-resolution contract. Athena validates the local checkout first, reports the revision and limits, and can refresh it when gh, authentication, and network access are available. If refresh cannot run or fails, Athena keeps the validated local revision and reports the freshness limit. Missing local knowledge, authentication failure, network failure, and update failure do not stop the primary task.

Mnemosyne delivery and Hephaestus execution use trusted, current dependency checkouts. At these boundaries, an invalid override, a trust or authentication failure, a checkout mismatch, or an update failure is fatal. If learn has an evidence-backed, non-duplicate lesson and direct write authority, it uses an isolated worktree and a pull request. In all other conditions, it reports without a mutation.

Script-backed skills require Git and Python 3.12 or newer on the host. Dependency resolution and the GitHub pull-request route also require authenticated GitHub CLI (gh) access. GitHub issue and repository routes require the authenticated GitHub capability that their skill selects.

GitLab issue, merge-request, and epic routes require an authenticated GitLab capability from the host. They must not fall back to GitHub CLI. A skill does not require a forge client when it does not select a forge route. Athena ships scripts as plugin resources. It does not install a Python package or a third-party runtime library.

Install

Use the documented skill or plugin mechanism of your coding harness to install Athena. Use the Git-backed Athena source. Prefer an immutable commit or a supported release tag. Then, restart or reload the harness so that it can find the Athena skills.

opencode installs Athena as the scoped npm plugin @homericintelligence/athena-opencode. Add this plugin to the plugins array of your opencode.json:

{
  "$schema": "https://opencode.ai/config.json",
  "plugins": ["@homericintelligence/athena-opencode"]
}

Then, quit and restart opencode. At startup, the plugin installs the canonical skill corpus in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/opencode/skills/athena/. The default path is ~/.config/opencode/skills/athena/. opencode finds the skills in that location. The plugin writes only in its athena/ namespace. See npm/athena-opencode/README.md for details and removal steps.

Invoke skills through the native skill mechanism of the harness. For example, ask the harness to use the repo-review skill. Use the same mechanism to update or remove the configured Git-backed source or npm plugin.

Some workflows optionally need delegation or explicitly scoped web access. When those capabilities are unavailable, Athena uses sequential work where supported or reports the capability gap. Install any required third-party extensions through the harness's own package mechanism and review their source before installing them.

Mnemosyne and Hephaestus remain Athena's repository integrations under the contract above. They are not copied into or represented as coding-harness packages.

Release archives

Coding harnesses install Athena from the Git-backed skill or plugin source above. Each GitHub release also provides a checksummed portable archive for offline distribution and provenance. The archive is not a Python package. It does not replace an installation from source.

The archive contains only these items:

• skills that coding harnesses use;
• host metadata;
• runtime documentation;
• assets; and
• notices.

The archive excludes these items:

• tests;
• repository scripts;
• development lockfiles;
• task-runner files;
• continuous integration configuration; and
• generated development output.

Skills

• Architecture-first review: change-review, repo-review, and pr-review.
• Review support: review-exchange.
• Issue planning, review, and finalization: plan-issue, issue-review, and finalize-plan.
• Engineering: brainstorm, realign, simplify, systematic-debugging, and test-driven-development.
• Coordination: myrmidon-swarm, git-worktrees, and tidy.
• Knowledge and enablement: advise and learn.

All harnesses consume the same top-level skills/ directory. Missing delegation runs sequentially with the current agent.

Develop

Prerequisites are Git, uv, Just, and Python 3.12 or newer for repository validation only. The checked-in .python-version file pins the default repository-tooling interpreter to Python 3.14.8. Set UV_PYTHON to another interpreter within the >=3.12,<3.15 contract for compatibility tests. Full environment setup lives in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Layout

skills/                  canonical skills and their tested local helpers
scripts/                 typed validation, CI-policy, and archive tooling
tests/unit/              executable-script behavior tests
docs/                    local policies and dependency contracts
.github/                 ownership and required/release workflows

License

BSD-3-Clause. See LICENSE, NOTICE, and skills/THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md.