agent-id

Portable identity registry and OMP companion extension for coding-agent sessions.

The agent-id binary assigns a permanent human-readable name to a stable session ID. The registry is durable, realm-aware, and independent of any particular agent harness.

In OMP, the companion extension makes identity automatic: it registers sessions, records the OMP lifecycle signal, and derives a concise current-work summary from completed agent turns.

The Rust crate is named agent-id-cli; the installed binary remains agent-id.

Installation

Homebrew

brew install derekstride/tap/agent-id-cli

Cargo

cargo install agent-id-cli

OMP plugin

Install the binary first, then install the OMP extension from this repository:

omp plugin install https://github.com/DerekStride/agent-id-cli

Once installed, the extension handles the normal identity workflow automatically.

Usage

With the OMP plugin, each session receives a stable identity and current lifecycle information without manual setup. Inspect recent identities from a terminal:

agent-id discover
agent-id discover --recent 24
agent-id discover --all
agent-id lookup "Spring Oak of Darkwood"

Discovery shows non-stopped sessions by default, including available summaries, materialized states, and working directories. Herdr state takes precedence when runtime information is available, followed by the OMP extension state, with unknown when neither signal exists. Use --all to include stopped sessions from the registry.

For standalone use without OMP, register a harness session ID once and look it up later:

agent-id register SESSION_ID
agent-id lookup SESSION_ID

Run agent-id --help or agent-id <command> --help for all commands and options.

Origin and companion project

agent-id is based on Josh Beckman's design for coordinating dozens of coding agents. It carries forward the central identity decisions from that work: externally assigned human-readable names keyed to stable harness session IDs, machine realms that partition allocation, and durable lookup independent of model self-report. This project extracts the identity registry and OMP lifecycle integration; agent-to-agent communication, workspaces, and other coordination concerns remain separate.

As a companion project, AgentMail provides agent-to-agent messaging that uses these human-readable identities while keeping delivery and read state separate from the identity registry. agent-id remains transport-agnostic, so other communication and coordination tools can integrate with the same identities.