---
title: Introduction
description: Overview of NIKI and its multi-agent architecture.
sidebar:
  order: 1
  label: Introduction
---

## 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.

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## 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.