ARCHITECTURE // OVERVIEW
Architecture Overview
System topology and the boundary between the OS core and its interface shells.
LisaOS is organised in three layers: an operator layer, a set of interchangeable interface shells, and a single OS core.
Topology
Every shell reaches the same core over the same internal API. The shells are interchangeable; the core is singular.
The core
The OS core is server-bound and reachable only over a tailnet-internal endpoint. It holds:
- Personality & governance — one source of truth propagated to every shell.
- Skills & tools — the skill inventory, the MCP server set, and a tool manifest that records hardware constraints.
- Memory & state — the memory gateway (an Express + SQLite service exposing the psychic cache, persistent memory, dispatch control, and the session registry).
- Self-improvement — the Curator, the Dream cycle, and the feedback/eval pipeline.
- Vault — the Sage Library, dual-written from local sync and mounted read-side on the server.
Boundaries
Infrastructure coordinates (hosts, ports, filesystem paths, service names) are deployment details of the core, not architectural boundaries. What matters architecturally is that every shell reaches the same core over the same API.
See Single-core philosophy, Interface shells, and OS core.