small-agent

A personal business operator for solo founders.

small-agent is a founder-focused CLI wrapper around rho, the always-on personal AI agent with persistent memory, scheduled check-ins, and a local web UI.

It adds an onboarding questionnaire that turns a generic agent into a tailored workspace for running a solo business: priorities, follow-ups, decisions, SOPs, growth channels, and weekly execution.

Why small-agent?

Solo founders do not need another blank chat box. They need an operator that knows the business context and keeps momentum:

• Founder onboarding — captures company, stage, customer, business model, metric, bottleneck, and channels.
• Tailored workspace — writes a founder profile, heartbeat prompt, and seed memories into ~/.rho/.
• Always-on check-ins — uses rho’s heartbeat daemon to surface open loops and next actions.
• Business operating mode — prioritization, pipeline, SOPs, decisions, weekly review, and follow-up tracking.
• Local-first — your workspace and memory live on your machine.

Install small-agent

For non-technical Mac/Linux users

Open Terminal, paste this command, then press Enter:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/emilfunk/small-agent/main/install.sh | bash

When it finishes, start setup with:

small-agent init

The installer checks for Node.js 18+, installs it with Volta if needed, installs small-agent, then verifies the small-agent command works.

Windows

Use WSL/Ubuntu, then run the Mac/Linux installer command above. Native Windows is not recommended yet because the upstream agent uses tmux.

Manual install

If you already have Node.js 18+:

npm install -g https://github.com/emilfunk/small-agent/archive/refs/heads/main.tar.gz

Requirements: Node.js 18+ and tmux.

Quick start

small-agent init
small-agent sync
small-agent login
small-agent start
small-agent

small-agent init initializes rho, then asks a required onboarding questionnaire.

Your answers create:

~/.rho/small-agent-founder-profile.md
~/.rho/small-agent-heartbeat-prompt.txt
~/.rho/brain/brain.jsonl

The shorter alias small is also installed:

small status
small web --open

Onboarding

Re-run the founder questionnaire anytime:

small-agent onboard --force

For unattended installs:

small-agent init --no-onboarding
small-agent onboard

What it asks

Small-agent asks for the context a founder assistant actually needs:

• founder and company name
• company stage
• business model
• target customer
• 90-day goal
• key metric
• biggest bottleneck
• products/offers
• growth and sales channels
• preferred check-in cadence and tone
• decisions and watch areas for proactive help

Common commands

small-agent init          # initialize rho + founder onboarding
small-agent onboard       # create tailored founder workspace
small-agent sync          # sync config to pi settings
small-agent login         # authenticate with pi providers
small-agent start         # start background agent
small-agent status        # daemon/module status
small-agent web --open    # open browser workspace

Most commands are forwarded directly to the upstream rho CLI.

Notes

• This is a wrapper, not a fork. Core agent behavior comes from @rhobot-dev/rho.
• Upstream rho currently stores config and memory under ~/.rho/.
• If you want all internal paths and upstream help text renamed away from rho, use a fork instead of this thin wrapper.

Development

git clone https://github.com/emilfunk/small-agent.git
cd small-agent
npm install
npm test

License

MIT