GitHub - arthurcolle/dsco: Distributed Systems presents DSCO: Agentic LLM CLI with tool use, swarms, MCP, and a rich TUI — written in C

dsco is a C-first agentic CLI with streaming LLM interaction, tool execution, swarms/sub-agents, MCP integration, plugins, markdown rendering, semantic routing, and timeline/trace observability.

Quick Start

Bootstrap Dependencies (macOS/Linux)

Build

make -j8
make debug   # build dsco-debug with symbols for stepping/debugging

Run (Interactive)

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...
./dsco

For step-through debugging in development mode, use the symbolized artifact:

make debug
DSCO_TRACE_STDERR=1 ./dsco-debug -m sonnet

dsco-debug defaults to DSCO_TRACE=debug unless DSCO_TRACE is explicitly set (for example DSCO_TRACE=0).

Run (One-Shot)

./dsco "inspect this repository and summarize module boundaries"

Run Tests

Hygiene Checks

make lint
make static-analysis
make asan-test
make ubsan-test
make check-version
make docs-check
pre-commit run --all-files

Core Capabilities

• Streaming LLM responses with tool-use loop (agent.c, llm.c)
• 288 built-in tools plus MCP-discovered and plugin-provided tools (tools.c, mcp.c, plugin.c)
• Multi-provider model support (Anthropic + OpenAI-compatible providers) (provider.c)
• Hierarchical swarm/sub-agent orchestration (swarm.c, ipc.c)
• Rich terminal UI + markdown renderer (tui.c, md.c)
• SQLite timeline logging and trace spans (baseline.c)
• Setup/env profile management (setup.c)

Documentation

Start with the documentation index:

• Documentation Index

Detailed references:

• Architecture & Runtime Flows
• C Module Reference (all .c/.h files)
• API Reference (auto-generated from headers)
• Built-in Tool Catalog
• Python & Web Asset Reference
• Operations, Config, Storage, and Troubleshooting
• How-To Guides
• Architecture Diagrams
• Docs Contributing Guide
• Runbooks

Repository Layout

• main.c / agent.c: CLI entrypoints and interactive loop
• llm.c / provider.c: request building, SSE streaming, provider abstraction
• tools.c / integrations.c: built-in tools and external API wrappers
• swarm.c / ipc.c: process orchestration and SQLite-backed inter-agent IPC
• md.c / tui.c: rendering and terminal UX
• baseline.c: timeline web server + trace span persistence
• scripts/: large domain-specific Python analyzers
• www/: static freight dashboard/report pages

Governance

• Contributing Guide
• Security Policy
• Code of Conduct
• Code Owners

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.