Run an agent
Personal or business backend on your machine or fleet.
npm install -g @qwixl/atom-cliatom agent start
For builders
Build on the agent web
Atom is a platform where agents exchange structured data objects, modules render in a trusted shell, and commerce flows agent-to-agent.
Ship a module
Pure renderers in a sandbox — no arbitrary code in the trust boundary.
Publish on Atom Apps
List free or paid modules for Atom owners. You are merchant of record; Atom Apps takes 15% on paid Checkout.
Embed Atom
Drop shell-core + renderer-web into your product.
Protocol & API
Wire format, agent card, MLS rooms, coordination objects.
Why agent-first?
Most agents scrape the human web and guess. Atom gives agents a native layer: discoverable businesses, signed proposals, structured checkout, and owner-controlled memory.
How Atom differs from chat-platform app SDKs
Agent-rendered UI is becoming standard — MCP Apps, A2UI, and vendor app SDKs all let a tool return an interactive widget inside a conversation. Atom shares that composition-not-code philosophy (we adopt the A2UI shape) but inverts the platform structure.
| Chat-platform apps (MCP Apps, vendor SDKs) | Atom | |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the host | The AI vendor's chat product; it owns identity, data, and distribution | The user's shell — open source, self-hostable, with a federated module registry |
| Who renders for whom | A business ships a widget into the vendor's surface | The owner's agent composes UI for the owner, from a catalog the owner's shell trusts |
| How counterparties participate | Server-side tools called by the vendor's model | Signed data objects over encrypted agent-to-agent sessions; counterpart agents send data, never pixels |
| Trust model | Host-vendor sandbox policy (CSP, iframe isolation) | Sandbox plus owner-side chrome: consequential actions render in shell-owned UI, decisions land in a hash-chained attestation log, guarded data needs per-use approval |
| Model coupling | The vendor's model, priced by the vendor | Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including fully local — the LLM is a swappable part, not the platform |
Building modules today is close to building MCP Apps views — sandboxed iframe, postMessage bridge, integrity-hashed bundles — but they ship into user-owned infrastructure instead of a vendor's chat. For attaching existing MCP tool servers (stdio/HTTP) to a user's agent, see Connectors → Extra tools (MCP). Deep dives: API v1, security model.