ApodexAI/FrontierAgent

Tech Blog · Tech Report

FrontierAgent is an open-source agent runtime, terminal product, and evaluation suite for long-horizon research and file-based work. The frontier-agent TUI ships two native workflows:

• ReAct — one stateful agent researches, reads files, writes deliverables, runs commands, and iterates in a task-scoped sandbox.
• Agent Team — a coordinator maintains a task board, delegates independent work to parallel sub-agents, collects their reports, and synthesizes the result.

The same workflow engine powers the benchmark runner used to evaluate Apodex models. The framework, tools, workflows, and evaluation layer remain separate, so each can be reused independently.

New here? Use the documentation index to find the right installation, SGLang, workflow, evaluation, or developer guide.

• Native Agent Team workflow. The coordinator decomposes the request, dispatches bounded parallel assignments, receives structured reports, and can use an optional fast reporter for final evidence review.
• Task Board. Agent Team's add_task and update_task events appear live in the TUI sidebar with pending, active, completed, blocked, and cancelled state.
• Sandboxed file work. Shell and file tools share one task-scoped filesystem: /inputs is read-only, /workspace is working state, and /outputs contains persistent deliverables. Authorization and sandbox failures are fail-closed.
• Asynchronous intervention. Type while an agent is running to queue a new instruction. It is injected at the next safe turn boundary without discarding the active run. In Agent Team mode it steers the coordinator; already-running sub-agents are allowed to finish.
• Transparent deliverables. On macOS/Docker, /outputs maps to .apodex/runs/<session-id>/outputs on the host. The same run directory also contains its checkpoint, trace, engine log, and trajectories.
• Approval, trace, and recovery. Mutating operations show a diff and require approval unless --yes is enabled. Sessions are checkpointed, every action is traced locally, /revert restores session changes, and --resume continues a saved run.
• Evaluation included. The subprocess runner supports research and file-grounded benchmarks, deterministic artifact collection, concurrency, progress inspection, and rerunning individual failures.

Conceptual Agent Team workflow, from task delegation and asynchronous report collection to verification and final synthesis.

flowchart LR
    U["User / benchmark task"] --> TUI["TUI or subprocess runner"]
    TUI --> R["Stateful ReAct"]
    TUI --> C["Agent Team coordinator"]
    C --> B["Task board"]
    B --> S1["Sub-agent 1"]
    B --> S2["Sub-agent 2"]
    B --> SN["Sub-agent N"]
    R --> FS["Task sandbox"]
    S1 --> FS
    S2 --> FS
    SN --> FS
    FS --> I["/inputs (read-only)"]
    FS --> W["/workspace (working files)"]
    FS --> O["/outputs (deliverables)"]
    S1 --> C
    S2 --> C
    SN --> C
    C --> A["Final answer / report"]
    R --> A

The repository boundaries are intentional:

frontier_agent/  generic loop, scheduling, registries, AgentBus, observers
plugins/tools/   web, shell, file, sandbox, and team tool implementations
workflows/       ReAct and Agent Team pipelines, profiles, prompts, observers
apodex/          terminal CLI/TUI, approvals, sessions, traces, and Docker path
benchmarks/      public harness plus bundled FrontierSearchBench/FrontierChallenge

More detail: framework architecture, Agent Team, and Stateful ReAct. See run artifacts and timestamps for the on-disk layout.

Requirements: Git, Python 3.12, uv, and an OpenAI-compatible model endpoint. Docker is optional.

git clone https://github.com/ApodexAI/FrontierAgent.git
cd FrontierAgent

uv sync --python 3.12 --extra dev
cp .env.example .env

Add your endpoint to .env:

OPENAI_API_KEY=your-key
OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://your-openai-compatible-endpoint/v1
OPENAI_MODEL=your-model-name

# Optional web research tools
WEB_SEARCH_PROVIDER=serper
SERPER_API_KEY=
SERPER_BASE_URL=https://google.serper.dev
JINA_API_KEY=

Support any Serper.dev-compatible endpoint (like litescrape.com, serpbase.dev, and others) by setting SERPER_BASE_URL and a provider-issued SERPER_API_KEY.

Set WEB_SEARCH_PROVIDER=parallel to use the free, keyless Parallel Search MCP for web_search. Serper remains the default, so existing keys and missing-key errors keep their current behavior. Parallel MCP does not support the tool's custom region, language, or time filters, or counts above 10 per query; choose Serper when those are needed. web_fetch continues to use its existing fetch provider.

Start the TUI:

# Stateful single-agent workflow
uv run frontier-agent --mode react --cwd /path/to/project

# Coordinator plus parallel sub-agents
uv run frontier-agent --mode agent_team --cwd /path/to/project

uv sync above installs the lightweight terminal runtime. Scientific and document packages are intentionally optional in native mode; the agent installs only what a task actually needs into <project>/.apodex/runtime/native. The apodex command is retained as a compatibility alias.

To run frontier-agent like any other command-line tool, install it from this repository with uv and keep the endpoint in one user file:

uv tool install --python 3.12 git+https://github.com/ApodexAI/FrontierAgent.git

# Put OPENAI_API_KEY, OPENAI_BASE_URL and OPENAI_MODEL into
# ${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/apodex/env and chmod 600 it.

cd /path/to/project
frontier-agent

Exported variables and a project .env still take precedence over the user file. On macOS with Docker running, the container image has to be built once from a clone. Install once and launch from any project covers the PATH setup, the precedence rules, the Docker step, and updating.

Prefer a script that does all of the above? ./scripts/run-macos.sh and ./scripts/run-linux.sh set up a hosted-endpoint install, and ./scripts/run-linux-gpu.sh --install-system-deps --setup-only prepares a native, isolated SGLang environment on a Linux NVIDIA GPU. The step-by-step equivalent is the endpoint quickstart (中文教程), which requires neither model self-hosting nor Docker.

Local SGLang serving is pinned to reviewed NVIDIA driver / CUDA / SGLang tracks, and a mismatch surfaces late as opaque CUDA or Triton kernel errors during model load. Confirm your nvidia-smi driver against the GPU compatibility matrix before choosing an image tag or native pin. The GPU helper selects a reviewed userspace track from the host driver, but never installs or replaces the driver itself.

The operating system, FrontierAgent runtime, and model runtime are independent choices. “NVIDIA” describes the local model service, not how the agent itself runs. Unsure which applies to your machine or GPU provider? Start with the installation chooser.

Chinese-speaking macOS users can use the macOS 中文安装与一键启动指南.

Pre-built linux/amd64 and linux/arm64 images are published to the GitHub Container Registry, so no local Python environment is needed. That package is private, so docker login ghcr.io (with an account authorized for it) is required — otherwise build the checkout:

cp .env.example .env
docker compose -f compose.yaml -f compose.dev.yaml build
docker compose -f compose.yaml -f compose.dev.yaml run --rm agent

• Run FrontierAgent in Docker — Compose, image pinning, direct docker run, and EC2/ECS deployment.
• Docker SGLang on a Linux NVIDIA host — two containers on one network; SGLang owns the GPU.
• Native SGLang without nested Docker — for managed GPU environments that forbid a nested daemon.
• SGLang configuration reference — every .env.sglang variable, token-budget invariants, and tuning order. Production 35B templates for RTX 4090, RTX 5090, and two-GPU hosts live under config/sglang/.

Run without a task for an interactive session, or pass one and stay in the session for follow-ups:

uv run frontier-agent --mode agent_team --cwd /repo \
  "Research the alternatives, verify the evidence, and write a report"

# One-shot, line mode, or resume a saved session
uv run frontier-agent --mode react --cwd /repo -p "explain src/main.py"
uv run frontier-agent --mode agent_team --no-tui "compare these implementations"
uv run frontier-agent --resume

# Attach read-only documents before the TUI starts (repeatable)
uv run frontier-agent --mode react --cwd /repo \
  --input ~/Downloads/claim.pdf --input ~/Desktop/photo.jpg

The sidebar carries the plan/task board, live tool activity, deliverables, and a session-scoped diff. While a workflow is busy, typing a follow-up queues it for the next safe turn boundary rather than interrupting the run.

For the four sidebar tabs, previews, approvals, attachments, clipboard support, keys, and Agent Team live steering, see the TUI user guide (中文使用教程). The full slash-command, option, and theming reference is apodex/README.md.

Agent Team parallelism is additional to benchmark concurrency. When evaluating, start with --concurrency 1; total simultaneous model calls can approach runner concurrency multiplied by the team spawn limit.

Set SWARM_NO_WEB=1 to disable Agent Team web tools or REACT_NO_WEB=1 for closed-book ReAct tasks.

File and shell tools share this one task sandbox and path policy. Interactive sessions add an approval gate on writes, deletion, package installation, and risky shell commands; some operations stay denied even with --yes; and file mutations are journaled so /revert can undo them.

Details: sandboxing and path policy, approval and trace behavior, and the security policy.

uv sync --frozen --extra sandbox --extra document-readers --extra eval --extra dev
uv run pytest -q
uv run ruff check .

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full development environment, pre-flight checks, session debugging, and submission process. Building the container image is covered in Run FrontierAgent in Docker.

The evaluation harness runs each benchmark question in an isolated subprocess, supports resumable multi-run experiments, and dispatches benchmark-specific deterministic or model-based judges. A minimal smoke run, once the datasets are downloaded per the evaluation guide, is:

uv sync --extra eval --extra sandbox --extra document-readers
uv run python -m benchmarks.public.runner.run_subprocess \
  --benchmark browsecomp --pipeline stateful-react-agent --profile default \
  --limit 1 --concurrency 1 --out ./results/smoke

The evaluation guide is the canonical operator reference for credentials, judge preflight, datasets, file benchmarks, execution, and result inspection. The benchmark registry lists dataset keys, default pipelines, scoring implementations, and extension points. FrontierSearchBench has its own external scorer and an isolation requirement, so it is documented separately in FrontierSearchBench evaluation.

BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, xbench-DeepResearch, Humanity's Last Exam (text-only), SuperChem, FrontierScience-Research, FrontierScience-Olympiad, DeepSearchQA, WideSearch, FrontierSearchBench, OfficeQA, GDPval, APEX, and OneMillion-Bench.

GDPval uses deterministic deliverable validation in this open-source harness; the agentic pairwise grader is intentionally excluded. The benchmark registry is authoritative for each dataset key, its default pipeline, and its scoring implementation.

The chart above compares the two FrontierAgent workflows with the Apodex-1.0 baseline and selected external systems. The Apodex results are summarized here:

Earlier Apodex-1.0 checkpoints remain available in the Hugging Face collection, with model cards and serving guidance.

Cite the current release:

@article{apodex11,
  title         = {Apodex-1.1: Scaling Agentic Intelligence for Complex Work},
  author        = {Apodex Team},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2608.23283},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.AI},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23283}
}

@misc{frontierchallenge,
  title        = {FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completion},
  author       = {Su, Liangcai and Feng, Zhaopeng and Chen, Zhuo and Zhang, Zhen
                  and Lin, Xiang and Li, Ruilin and Zhang, Handuo and Wang, Ning
                  and Wen, Kailong and Guo, Yueqi and Xing, Feng and Guo, Yiling
                  and Qian, Chenxiong and Du, Simon Shaolei and Bing, Lidong
                  and Wang, Xinyu},
  year         = {2026}
}

For work that refers specifically to the previous generation:

@techreport{apodex10,
  title  = {Apodex-1.0: A Verification-Centric Agent Team for Discoverative Intelligence},
  author = {Apodex Team},
  year   = {2026}
}

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.