Introduction

Overview of NIKI and its multi-agent architecture.

Introduction to NIKI

NIKI is an autonomous, hermetic multi-agent coding engine written in Rust (2024 edition).

It is designed to solve a fundamental problem in AI-assisted software development: the babysitting tax of single-agent chat interfaces.

Instead of interacting in a single long conversation where a single LLM writes code, overlooks bugs, and confirms its own assumptions, NIKI runs an autonomous multi-stage pipeline of role-isolated agents inside an unprivileged container.

Core Tenets

1. Multi-Agent, Not Monolithic: Planning, coding, test synthesis, and code review are separate agents with isolated system prompts, role constraints, and independent model selections.
2. Context Isolation: Agents do not share chat history. They communicate strictly through structured, typed JSON schemas (TaskSpec, CodeDiff, TestReport, ReviewVerdict).
3. Hermetic Sandboxing: All code modifications and test executions occur inside an ephemeral rootless container bind-mounted to a temporary copy of your repository.
4. Git Branch Output: The output of every run is a real Git branch (niki/<id>) containing a conventional commit, unified diff (changes.patch), and an audit trail (report.md).
5. BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys): No bundled gateways or lock-in. Connect directly to Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, NVIDIA NIM, Together AI, Groq, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, or run offline with Ollama.