The external-agents repository is a Go-based project that provides standalone external agent binaries designed to extend the Entire CLI with support for additional AI coding agents. The repository serves as a plugin architecture that allows Entire CLI to integrate with AI agents it does not natively support through a standardized protocol.
External agents function as standalone binaries following the naming convention entire-agent-<name>. When installed on a user's PATH, these binaries are automatically discovered by Entire CLI and enable three core capabilities: creating checkpoints during AI coding sessions to allow rewinding mistakes, capturing transcripts of AI agent actions and reasoning, and installing hooks that integrate the AI agent's lifecycle events such as start, stop, and commit operations into Entire's workflow. Communication between external agents and Entire CLI occurs through a JSON-based protocol using stdin and stdout subcommands, with the full specification documented in the Entire CLI repository.
The repository currently implements three external agents. The Kiro agent provides hooks and transcript analysis functionality. The Amp agent extends this with token calculation and compact transcript support. The Qwen Code agent targets the terminal-based qwen coding agent and includes hooks, transcript analysis, and compact transcript capabilities. Each agent is housed in its own directory under agents/ with dedicated README documentation for setup and usage.
External agent discovery is opt-in and requires setting external_agents: true in a repository's .entire/settings.json configuration file. Without this flag, Entire CLI ignores external agent binaries even when they are installed on the system. For Qwen Code specifically, the adapter installs command hooks in .qwen/settings.json and maintains session transcripts in a repo-scoped temporary directory with markers in .entire/tmp/ for session discovery.
The repository includes built-in guidance for developers building new external agents through skills discoverable by multiple AI coding tools including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and OpenCode. The skill files are located in .claude/skills/entire-external-agent/ and provide step-by-step guidance without requiring additional setup.
Testing is structured across multiple layers. Generic protocol compliance checks run in GitHub Actions through the external-agents-tests repository, which builds each entire-agent-* binary and runs a shared compliance suite. Agent-specific unit and build checks run in GitHub Actions for every discovered agent directory. Lifecycle tests remain in the repository's e2e/ harness and verify prompt execution, hook installation, checkpoint creation, rewind behavior, and interactive sessions. The lifecycle harness auto-discovers and builds all agents via TestMain, with agent adapters in e2e/agents/ and Entire CLI wrappers in e2e/entire/.
GitGenius activity data shows the repository maintains rapid issue and pull request response times with a median latency of 0.0 hours and mean latency of 22.7 hours across seven tracked items. Enhancement requests represent the most active issue label category with six tracked items. The most active contributors tracked by GitGenius are blackgirlbytes with seven events, savekirk with six events, and alishakawaguchi with five events. The repository shares overlapping contributors with entireio/cli, oven-sh/bun, and anomalyco/opencode.
