What is AgentsVille

AgentsVille is a self-hosted workspace you run on hardware you control, using your own Provider keys. One running instance of it is a Village. One person — the Operator — deploys it, holds the keys, and decides who may register. Everyone the Operator invites is a Player, and every Player creates NPCs, gives them jobs, and holds Conversations with them.

The problem it solves

A model that can only produce text leaves three gaps, and all three show up on the first real piece of work.

Nothing is visible. Reasoning and Tool use are the parts of a model's work you most need to check, and they are usually the parts you never see. A paragraph appears, and you have no way to tell a considered answer from a confident guess.

Nothing is actionable. No files, no terminal, no browser, no reach into the systems your work actually lives in. Every answer is a suggestion you then have to carry out by hand.

Nothing persists. Each Conversation starts from zero. Explain a process on Monday and you explain it again on Tuesday, to the same NPC.

Hosted products close those gaps by taking custody of your data and of your spend. AgentsVille's premise is the opposite one: a server you control, the keys you already pay for, nobody in the middle.

What AgentsVille is instead

A Village is a small staff, not a message box.

You hire an NPC by giving it a name, a Job Title, and a system prompt. You watch it think: reasoning arrives as its own Part of a Message, distinct from the answer and collapsed until you open it. You watch it work: every Tool call renders in order, with what was sent and what came back, and a failed call renders as failed rather than quietly disappearing.

You correct it once and the correction holds. A Skill is written instructions an NPC loads when they are relevant. A Memory is something an NPC should still know in a Conversation that has not happened yet — and every Memory is listed, editable and deletable by the Player who can see it.

You give an NPC a Sandbox when it needs to do rather than describe: a machine of its own, with a filesystem that survives between Conversations, a terminal, and a browser. Every NPC gets its own, so several can work at the same time without colliding. A Sandbox cannot reach the internet unless the Operator turns that on for that NPC.

When a job spans more than one NPC, you put them in the same Conversation. That is a Party, and the NPCs in it can address each other.

All of it runs on the Operator's hardware, against the Operator's keys.

Who this is for

The Operator

The Operator runs AgentsVille on a server they control. They hold the Provider keys, set the Village's default Provider and Model, decide who may register by handing out an Invite Code, and carry the bill.

They are technical enough to run docker compose and edit a .env file. They are also the only person who can widen what NPCs are allowed to do — enabling network egress from a Sandbox, or registering an MCP Server that runs a command on the host. That is deliberate: those are the two decisions that change what a mistake can cost.

AgentsVille records the tokens each Message consumed, but it never enforces a quota. The spend cap in your Provider's console is the only hard ceiling on a bill.

The Player

A Player was given an Invite Code and used it to register. They create NPCs, give them jobs, and hold Conversations.

A Player does not have to be technical. Connecting mail or an issue tracker should not require knowing what MCP stands for, and no Player should be asked to trust a Memory they cannot read and delete.

On a small instance the Operator is usually also the first Player. The first person to register on a fresh Village becomes the Operator, and everyone after that is a Player.

Where to go next

• What an NPC is — the character you hire, and everything that can hang off it.
• Quick start — get a Village running on your own machine.