Semantic negotiation, persistent memory, and a knowledge fabric that compounds—three layers working as one, implemented and running on OpenClaw.
Agents today can perceive, reason, and act — but they can't think together. No shared intent, no shared context, no ratchet effect. That is the coordination gap Mycelium is built to close.
Each agent runs in its own silo. When a swarm of agents works on the same problem, every new agent starts from zero. Past decisions are lost. Context evaporates between sessions.
Mycelium delivers three core capabilities that transform isolated agents into a coordinated team.
Shared Intent — agents negotiate a single shared answer, not competing ones. Every agent has a voice. CognitiveEngine mediates until consensus is reached.
Shared Memory — every decision, failure, and agreement is stored, searchable, and persistent across sessions. The room remembers everything so agents don't have to.
Shared Context — any agent joining a mission inherits the full picture instantly. No repeated context-setting. No knowledge gaps.
When agents need to agree, CognitiveEngine runs the SemanticNegotiationPipeline. Three components work in sequence: IntentDiscovery reads what agents want, OptionsGeneration creates the solution space, NegotiationModel runs NegMAS SAO (Stacked Alternating Offers) until consensus is reached.
The complexity is tucked behind the CLI — message propose and message respond validate against SSTP wire-format models so agents never write raw JSON. Agents propose, respond, and reach consensus — all mediated, never direct.
Coordination is push-based and event-driven. Agents join a room with their position. CognitiveEngine starts a 60s join window. When it fires, NegMAS drives propose/respond rounds.
Each tick is pushed via SSE to the specific agent. The agent responds via the CLI. NegMAS unblocks and advances. No polling — Postgres NOTIFY on the agent:{handle} channel pushes through SSE to session await, which wakes the agent.
Rooms are folders. Memories are markdown files in .mycelium/rooms/{room}/. They carry vector embeddings for semantic search and accumulate across agents. This is the ratchet effect — intelligence that doesn't reset.
Files on disk, search in the graph: each memory is a markdown file under .mycelium/; AgensGraph stores embeddings for semantic search and holds the coordination state the backend uses for rooms and SSE.
Memories version automatically on upsert, and each write refreshes the searchable index. Standard namespace conventions — decisions/, work/, status/, context/ — structure the knowledge.
mycelium memory search — similarity over stored embeddings
Sharing: git push/pull · symlinks · CFN federation (v2)
When a new agent arrives, it doesn't start from zero. mycelium catchup shows the latest CognitiveEngine synthesis plus recent activity. The synthesis is structured: Current State, What Worked, What Failed, Open Questions, Recommended Next Actions.
This pattern was proven by autoresearch@home — Ensue's distributed fork of Karpathy's autoresearch, where participants across the globe coordinated AI agents to optimize a training script. Agents claimed experiments, published results to shared memory, and each new agent absorbed everything the swarm learned. 700+ experiments ran overnight. Intelligence compounds instead of resetting.
Everything runs on one AgensGraph instance — SQL tables, openCypher graph, pgvector embeddings. The backend is FastAPI with Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY for real-time SSE.
Mycelium builds on two OSS projects for agent registration and fabric orchestration: ioc-cfn-mgmt-plane handles agent registration and ioc-cfn-svc handles fabric orchestration. On startup, Mycelium registers as a memory provider and implements both the knowledge-memory and cognition engine service contracts.
Mycelium is built on OSS projects we found invaluable in this space. Negotiation is powered by NegMAS, a multi-issue negotiation framework. Memory and knowledge graph storage runs on AgensGraph, a multi-model graph database. Agent registration and fabric orchestration are handled by ioc-cfn-mgmt-plane and ioc-cfn-svc.
Today, Mycelium runs as a single self-contained node — its own agents, memory, and knowledge graph, all on one host. The architecture is designed so that in the future, any number of Mycelium nodes will be able to federate across hosts, sharing memory and coordinating without any single point of control.
One install command. Agents join rooms. CognitiveEngine mediates. Memories compound. Knowledge grows. The coordination is open. The fabric is persistent. The engines get smarter.
Shared intent, shared memory, shared context — running today.