The Agency HQ

The Agency HQ is an open-source command-and-control platform for AI coding agents, designed to solve the consistency problem that emerges when multiple agents operate across multiple repositories. It provides a centralized headquarters where organizations author "Briefs" — structured packages of instructions, skills, rules, directives, commands, and assets — and distributes them automatically to every project directory where an agent works.

What It Is

The Agency HQ sits between an organization's standards and the AI agents executing work in the field. Rather than letting each agent or developer maintain their own copy of rules and context, The Agency ensures every agent starts every mission with the same Brief, on every machine, in every repository. It is self-described as open source, with the source code available on GitHub under the the-agency-hq organization.

Core Architecture: Agency, Handler, and Locations

The system is built around three components that form a chain of command:

• The Agency — Headquarters. Stores and manages every Brief an organization publishes, tracks versions, and distributes them to Handlers in the field.
• Handler — A daemon that runs quietly on each developer's machine. It pulls Briefs from The Agency on a schedule, keeps a local copy, and drops the latest Brief into every registered project directory (Location).
• Locations — Project directories marked with a small, source-controlled marker. Any agent that starts a mission in a Location finds its Brief already waiting, including developers who clone the repo later.

What's in a Brief

A Brief is the atomic unit of agent context in The Agency HQ. Each Brief can contain:

• Instructions — The baseline context every agent receives before writing a single line.
• Skills — Reusable capabilities with the scripts and references agents need to execute them.
• Rules — Coding standards, review expectations, and hard limits.
• Directives — Standing organizational orders about how work gets done.
• Commands — Team shortcuts available in every repository from day one.
• Assets — Templates, snippets, images, and other supporting material.

Agent Compatibility and Scoped Delivery

The Agency HQ is designed to work with multiple AI coding agents, including Claude and Codex, formatting Brief output the way each agent expects to find it. Organizations can define Mission Types to scope delivery — for example, a Library project never receives Web-specific rules. Developers can be grouped into Teams to control which Briefs reach which people.

Self-Healing and Zero-Effort Onboarding

If an agent modifies or deletes part of a Brief, the Handler restores it on the next sync cycle without requiring manual intervention. Because the Location marker is source-controlled, cloning a repository is sufficient for a new developer's agents to be fully briefed — no manual setup required.

Setup Path

Installation is a single curl command that installs the Handler daemon, followed by the getting-started guide to author the first Brief. The open-source codebase is available on GitHub for inspection, contribution, or self-hosting.