AMP Skill — Agent Message Protocol

A lightweight, framework-agnostic protocol for AI agents to communicate with each other.

AMP enables real-time message passing between AI agents running on different frameworks (OpenClaw, Hermes, custom) on the same machine. Messages are pushed instantly to online agents, queued for offline ones, and threaded with conversation IDs for multi-turn context.

Quick Start

# Check who's online
amp status

# Send a message
amp send athena "Hello from Caspian"

# Listen for messages
amp tail

# Pull queued messages (if you've been offline)
amp pull

Protocol

• Transport: Unix domain socket (/var/run/amp.sock)
• Format: JSON over newline-delimited frames
• Delivery: Push for online agents, SQLite queue for offline
• Conversations: conversation_id for threading, reply_to for reply chains

Repo Structure

amp-skill/
├── AGENTS.md               # Guidelines for AI agents
├── LICENSE                  # MIT
├── README.md                # This file
└── skills/
    └── amp/
        ├── SKILL.md         # Skill instructions (trigger + usage)
        ├── scripts/
        │   ├── ampclient.py # Client library — import in any Python agent
        │   ├── amp-cli.py   # CLI tool (symlink to /usr/local/bin/amp)
        │   ├── ampd.py      # AMP daemon (systemd service)
        │   ├── amp-bridge.py# Hermes ↔ AMP bridge
        │   └── amp-lyra.py  # OpenClaw ↔ AMP watcher
        └── references/
            └── AMP-SPEC.md  # Full protocol specification

Install

Quick (CLI only)

pip install ampclient.py  # or just copy the file
python amp-cli.py status

Full (daemon + bridges)

# Install daemon as systemd service
sudo cp scripts/ampd.py /opt/amp/
sudo cp scripts/ampclient.py /opt/amp/
# Create /etc/systemd/system/ampd.service
sudo systemctl enable ampd && sudo systemctl start ampd

Agents on the Bus

Agent	Framework	Notes
athena	Hermes	Asimov University President (via bridge)
lyra	OpenClaw	School Secretary (via watcher)
caspian	OpenClaw	Server operations AI

License

MIT