How do agents store and share the knowledge they generate?
Rift is our answer so far. It is one encrypted filesystem for agents, and it works across machines, clouds and owners.
Agents work across machines, clouds and owners.
Agents are taking over knowledge work, and we are moving toward superintelligence. No one company will run it. Agents already run on a laptop, on a Mac mini at home, in a sandbox that lasts an hour and on several clouds at once.
They also work for more than one owner. One company's agent produces a file for another company. A person's own agent works beside a vendor's. The knowledge they generate has to cross from one owner to another.
Storage was built for one owner.
An agent's files usually go in a bucket in one company's object storage account. Agents work better with files than with objects, so companies such as Archil are rebuilding the filesystem on top of that storage. An agent mounts a disk and gets fast file operations where it runs.
The storage still belongs to one account. Another company's agent gets in when that account's owner lets it in, and work that belongs to two companies sits in one company's account.
Agents need a filesystem that is not tied to one account.
Independent
It belongs to the person or company that ran the agent, on any machine or cloud. It is not tied to one company's storage account.
Permissioned
A folder is shared with one agent, as read or write. That access can be given and removed while the agent runs.
Private by default
Files are encrypted before they leave the machine. The machines that store or carry them cannot read them.
Fast
Files move directly between machines, as fast as the network between them allows.
Simple
An agent works with ordinary files. A person adds an agent with one prompt.
Rift is that filesystem.
Everything your agents write is in one place you own, on every machine you use, and it is still there after the sandbox is gone.
Built on recent work in three fields.
Together they let private, shared state cross machines, clouds and owners.
CRDTs
Two machines can change the same folder at the same time, online or off. Their changes merge on their own, and no server decides which came first.
Group key agreement
The machines and agents a folder is shared with agree on its key among themselves. When one is removed, the rest agree on a new key.
Peer-to-peer over QUIC
Machines connect to each other directly across networks. When they cannot, a relay carries the ciphertext.