Agents and the control plane

charly is built to be driven by an agent as well as by a person. That shows up in three places: the binary is itself an MCP server, the agent control plane is a first-class command family, and the marketplace ships a skill corpus for several harnesses.

The binary is an MCP server

charly mcp serve speaks the Model Context Protocol; mcp is served out-of-process by the plugin-mcp candy (mcp). The tool surface is built from the host’s own CLI model, so the RPC set follows the project you point charly at rather than a fixed list.

The package ships systemd units named charly-mcp, in both system and user scope:

systemd:
    - name: charly-mcp
      scope: system
      exec: /usr/bin/charly mcp serve --listen 127.0.0.1:18765
      description: Charly MCP server (Streamable HTTP on 127.0.0.1:18765)
      restart: on-failure
    - name: charly-mcp
      scope: user
      exec: /usr/bin/charly mcp serve --listen 127.0.0.1:18765
      description: Charly MCP server (user session, Streamable HTTP on 127.0.0.1:18765)
      restart: on-failure

They are installed but never enabled — nothing starts at boot; the operator starts one on demand with systemctl start charly-mcp or systemctl --user start charly-mcp. On the host the server binds loopback only; --listen 0.0.0.0:18765 is the explicit opt-in, normal inside a pod or VM deployment.

The agent control plane

plugin-agent owns the CUE-validated agent and agent-team kinds plus three command words:

Verb	What it is
charly agent	the headless, daemon-free agent control CLI — sessions, runs, ordered evidence, incidents, RCA and recovery decisions (agent)
charly tui	the terminal UI for the same control plane — browse and drive sessions, runs and terminal channels interactively (tui, recipe)
charly tmux	a typed compatibility facade preserving the legacy tmux command grammar; it never constructs remote tmux shell strings (tmux)

Everything routes through generic provider channels, so charly never reaches into an operator’s tmux socket.

The rest of the agent surface

Verb	What it is
charly pipeline	the domain-neutral agent/workflow engine — run a declared plan, the bare agent runtime, deterministic probes, template rendering (pipeline, recipe)
charly review	the PR-review engine: it assembles the complete PR context (body, every changed file’s unified diff, commits, comment thread) into one model call and emits a deterministic PASS/BLOCK verdict (review)
charly feature	the project-inspection surface — enumerate a project’s plan-shaped entity descriptions (list / pending / validate) (feature)
charly task	a named, host-native reusable plan authored as a task: node using the same step grammar a candy’s plan: uses (task)
charly agentteams	the management CLI for the AgentTeams controller REST API plus the declarative agentteams: check verb (agentteams)

The marketplace corpus

The marketplace ships a skill corpus for several agent harnesses. Its README names Claude Code (and Cursor, which reads the same .claude-plugin catalog), Codex CLI (via the .agents catalog), Kimi Code, and pi.

Skills are addressed as /charly-<plugin>:<skill> — for example a plugin family plus one of its skill names — and this site publishes that corpus under recipes, one page per skill plus its reference detail pages.

See also

• You and your agents — the concept behind the control plane.
• The CLI — the core spine versus the plugin-served catalog.
• Install — installing the packages that carry the charly-mcp units.