silas

Silas is a Rails-native framework for durable AI agents. An agent’s capabilities live as plain files in conventional locations inside the app you already run — easy to inspect, extend, and operate — and its tool effects land exactly once, even through a crash.

app/agent/
  instructions.md   # the persona
  agent.yml         # model + limits — data only
  tools/            # one file per tool; filename = identity, keywords = schema
  skills/           # markdown playbooks, loaded on demand
  schedules/        # cron frontmatter -> recurring turns
  channels/         # slack.rb, email.rb — transports bound to the loop
  connections/      # remote MCP servers as <name>.yml

Quick start

rails new my-agent -m https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danielstpaul/silas/main/templates/desk.rb
cd my-agent && bin/dev

This creates a new agent app with Solid Queue wired, a starter refund-desk agent installed, and a keyless demo — no API key needed for the first run. To add Silas to an existing app instead:

bundle add silas
bin/rails generate silas:install && bin/rails db:migrate

Learn

Start with the tutorial — it builds the refund desk outward, one primitive per chapter — and read guarantees for what’s promised (exactly-once effects, holds at zero compute, crash-safe turns) and how each claim is verified. Everything else is in the sidebar: Core for the pieces every agent uses, Advanced for the rest, Reference for configuration and deploy.

All of these docs also ship inside the gem — bundle show silas, then read docs/ offline — and the installer writes a Claude Code skill so a coding agent building on your app already knows the conventions.