What is Iris?

An AI operator that never clocks out. Message it on Slack, Telegram, or its built-in web UI and it runs commands, writes its own skills on the fly, provisions infrastructure, and spins up a fleet of specialized sub-agents — each one optionally sealed inside its own Firecracker microVM — to get the work done.

It runs on any Linux machine — a laptop, VPS, or cloud VM. The default install has zero cloud dependencies: secrets in /iris/.env, sub-agents in Docker. Azure Key Vault, Terraform, and Firecracker isolation are opt-in profiles for production hardening.

Highlights

• Self-extending — Iris writes and hot-reloads her own skills; no redeploy to teach her something new
• Fleet, not chatbot — spins up specialized sub-agents on demand, each talking over an HTTP bridge
• Defense in depth, opt-in — Docker by default; flip a flag and every sub-agent runs in its own Firecracker microVM with a hardware KVM boundary
• Provider-agnostic — Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, or AWS Bedrock, switchable via env vars
• Three transports, one engine — Slack, Telegram, and an optional built-in web UI; adding a transport requires zero engine edits
• Resilient — LLM retry with backoff, automatic context compaction, self-healing escalation
• Durable — GitHub is the source of truth; the machine is disposable and rebuildable from the repo

Install in one command

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/irisworks/iris-core/main/install.sh | bash

See Setup for all four install paths (± Azure Key Vault, ± Firecracker), then Configuration and Channel Modes to shape how Iris behaves.

How it fits together

You (Slack, Telegram, or web UI)
└── Iris  (any Linux machine, systemd service)
    ├── iris-runtime          the TypeScript engine
    ├── data/CONSTITUTION.md  read-only operator rules, injected every prompt
    ├── data/MEMORY.md        mutable global memory
    ├── skills/               hot-reloaded capabilities
    └── sub-agents            Docker containers or Firecracker microVMs,
                              reached via an internal HTTP bridge