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url: https://github.com/jessewaites/antiquity date_fetched: 2026-10-10

Antiquity

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/f6078aad-cb45-4230-8e28-3e4118ede52c

Antiquity is a CLI that scaffolds an opinionated workspace for hunting through historical sources with AI agents: the folder conventions, the rules of the game in AGENTS.md, the templates, and the traps that burned the investigations that came before. Your own coding agent does the plumbing.

It grew out of a real investigation, in which an AI pipeline over digitised colonial archives turned up a lost meteorite fall and a few other things the catalogues had missed. The process, the mistakes and the lessons are written up in AI found a lost meteorite in the archives. We built the plane as we flew it: the folder layout, the two-model funnel, the rule that nothing is a find until it has been read on the original page image, all of it was invented mid-flight. With the investigation done, Antiquity codifies that pipeline so the next one starts with it.

go install github.com/jessewaites/antiquity@latest
antiquity new my-investigation
cd my-investigation
# initialize your agent

That opens the title screen, asks four questions (name, the one-line question, a longer description, optional API keys) and creates the case. Everything after the name is optional: ctrl+s skips the rest, and the generated AGENTS.md tells the agent to ask you for whatever is missing.

my-investigation/
  AGENTS.md          rules, the seven-step loop, traps, folder map, your case
  CASE.md            question, status, plan
  HANDOFF.md         start here next session
  NARRATIVE.md       the story for the write-up, with credits
  lessons.md         traps found in this case's sources
  keys.example.yml   model roles and provider keys (copy to keys.yml)
  sources/ data/ queries/ judges/ runs/ candidates/ evidence/
  findings/ theories/ catalogues/ controls/ todo/ drafts/ templates/

The case is git init-ed with a pre-commit hook that refuses keys.yml and anything that looks like an API key.

Non-interactive, for agents and scripts (only the name is required):

antiquity new my-investigation --yes \
  --question "Pre-1800 bird sightings in Dutch colonial records" \
  --description "Searching ship logbooks for dodo sightings after 1660."

Flags: --no-intro, --no-git, --dir PATH. antiquity intro plays the title screen on its own; --snapshot --at 1500 prints one frame.

The process it encodes

  1. Question, plus a known-answer control.
  2. Retrieve wide (regex and embeddings).
  3. Sort cheap with a judge model.
  4. Read carefully with a reader model.
  5. Verify on the original page image. Nothing is a find before this.
  6. Novelty check against the catalogues.
  7. Save evidence, write it up.

Full rules and the list of traps are in the generated AGENTS.md.

Development

go run . new test-mystery
go test ./...

Go 1.27, Bubble Tea v2, Bubbles v2, Lip Gloss v2.