tropo
Documentation pages
On this page
  1. The idea
  2. Three words
  3. What you get
  4. What it is built from
  5. Who it is for
  6. Related

Verified against v1.102.0 on 2026-09-30 by orpheus-o42

What is Tropo

An operating system for work with AI agents, built from plain files in a folder you own.

This page explains what Tropo is, what you get when you install it, and why it is built the way it is. It takes about three minutes. To install it, go to the Quickstart.

The idea

AI agents are good at doing work and bad at keeping it. What an agent learned in one session is not there in the next unless someone wrote it down. Two agents cannot easily hand work to each other, and you cannot easily check what either one did.

Tropo gives agents a place to write it down: a folder of plain text files. An agent's identity, its memory, the tasks it is working on and the decisions it made are all files in that folder. When a session ends, the files stay. The next session reads them and carries on from what was recorded.

The name comes from the Greek tropos, "a way": Tropo is a way of working.

Three words

  • Tropo is the operating system: the method and the tools that come with it.
  • A Studio is one installation of Tropo, a folder on your computer. You can have more than one.
  • The Vault is the vault/ folder inside your Studio, where the governed records live: tasks, projects, decisions, and the definitions of each kind of record. Agents' own folders and the Studio's shared memory sit beside it, elsewhere in the Studio.

What you get

  • Agents that remember what they record. Each agent has an identity and a memory stored as files in your Studio. What it saves there (who you are, where it left off) is there in the next session and the one after.
  • Work you can track. Tasks, projects, decisions and pipelines, kept by you and your agents together. This part of Tropo is called Tropo Work.
  • Written rules, and a check against them. Each kind of record has a written definition of what it must contain and how its status may change. A validator checks the Studio's files against those definitions: required fields present, status values the type allows, references that point at records that exist. It checks what was written down; it cannot see what an agent did without recording it.
  • A concierge. Po greets you when you open your Studio without naming an agent. She sets the Studio up and routes you to what you want to do: create an agent, start a project, or learn how something works.
  • Two ready-made agents. Darin, a strategist, and Cal, an architect and builder, are offered when your Studio is set up. You can take either, both, or neither.
  • Safe updates. When Tropo updates, it replaces only the files it shipped, asks before touching anything that looks changed, and leaves a receipt of what it did.

What it is built from

There is no server to run and no separately managed database or app to install. Tropo is markdown files with structured headers, plus Python scripts that your AI tool runs. The Studio builds its own search index on your machine, including a small SQLite file, from those files. The AI tool you already use (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Windsurf, or another tool that can read and write files) is the engine. The Studio is what it works on.

That has three consequences:

  • You own everything. Your work is files on your computer. Nothing is locked in a service.
  • You can change tools. Your agents' memory is in the Studio, not in the AI tool, so what they saved comes with you when you open the Studio in a different tool. Conversation that was never saved, and each tool's own settings, do not.
  • You can check the work. Every record is a file you can open, and ordinary tools such as a text editor or grep work on all of it.

Tropo is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence.

Who it is for

Tropo is for people who want AI agents to do real, ongoing work and want to stay in charge of it: setting direction, making the calls that are theirs, and checking results. The agents do the work and keep the records. You verify what came out against what you asked for.