Welcome to This Month in Urbit, our series for sharing recent happenings from around the Urbit network. We aim to share new apps, bleeding edge experiments, and general news from the ecosystem in a way that helps you get your feet wet. To fully participate, you will need to know how to run an Urbit ship. If you don't know how to do that yet, point your favorite AI agent at this page and it will help get you started. Or check out the getting started documentation to do it the old school way.
Not quite ready to run your own ship? Many of these experiments can still be experienced if you have a hosted ship, but please note that most should not be considered stable software, so they could negatively impact your ship's functionality.
Alongside these articles we will include a pill that contains the featured software when it is offered in the form of a Gall application. If other code is necessary we'll also point to the appropriate resources for that as well, such as GitHub repositories.
This guide is written to be human-friendly, allowing you to follow along and learn something new. Embedded in this page are also instructions for your agent; share the link and your agent should help you through getting the enclosed items up and running. The AI landscape is fast-moving and variable, so we can't guarantee everything will work smoothly, but we try to test across various models and agent harnesses. If you or your agents ever get stuck, just give a shout in The Urbit Foundation group on Tlon Messenger and we'll help you out.
May Quickstart
To get started with our featured experiments for this month, try booting a moon off the May TMIU pill. If you don't have it already, get the runtime for your OS:
curl -fsSL https://urbit.org/get-runtime.sh | sh
In the dojo of your planet, run |moon and you'll get a moon networking key. You can do this from the webterm on a Tlon-hosted planet. Then boot your moon with the May TMIU pill:
urbit -w <moon-name> -G <moon-key> -u https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/urbit.orgcontent/tmiu-pills/tmiu-may.pill --http-port 8899
(if you don't have moon keys, replace the moon args with -c tmiu-may-comet to just get started with a comet.)
Read / Write / Share
An emergent theme this month is a growing quiver of tools for reading, writing, and sharing the written word. Whether you are a text creator, consumer, or circulator, we've got you covered.
Markdown made easy
Obsidian fans rejoice! ~nocsyx-lassul's %notes app brings compatibility between your urbit and your favorite notetaking app, with full-fledged Markdown file editing and viewing. And more than that, it enables both peer-to-peer sharing of those notes across the urbit network and a way to publish your Obsidian notes without requiring a 3rd party service.
Available publicly over the network, just run:
|install ~bospur-davmyl-nocsyx-lassul %notes
A few points of note:
~nocsyx-lassulwarns this is still experimental software so backup your important notes elsewhere- Publishing is dependent on your urbit being accessible from the clearweb. Every Urbit is eligible for its own arvo.network domain, if you don't already have a domain you would like to use for publishing.
- Not an Obsidian user? No problem, you can still just do everything on your urbit,
%notesis a full-fledged notetaking app on its own!
As a present but impermanent limitation, the desktop sync app referenced in the web interface is currently only available for macOS and the installation process is a little cumbersome because it's still experimental software:
- The download may warn you of downloading unknown software; select "keep" to finish the download.
- After downloading, double-click to open the
.dmgfile and then drag the app icon into your Applications folder. - In Finder, when you click app icon to open, it will warn to throw it in the trash, click 'Done' (instead of 'Move to Trash').
- Then open System Settings and go to Privacy & Security, scroll down to 'Security' and you should see
"Notes Sync.app" was blocked to protect your Mac. Click 'Open Anyway'.
You should now have the Notes Sync app in your menubar, allowing you to set Ship URL, Access Code, and a Sync Directory. Sign in with your details and watch the "Status" feed to see your files sync to your ship and back!
For the Bookworms
More of a reader than a writer? ~sitful-hatred has you covered with %boox (pronounced 'books', naturally), an e-reader that stores EPUBs, PDFs, and MOBI files, as well as Markdown, plaintext, and even HTML files. To install it on a live ship:
|install ~matwet %boox
Of course, it includes key features like comprehensive metadata, file references to Anna's Archive, and tracking your reading progress for any given book; start reading a new novel on your desktop (there's even a PWA you can install), and seamlessly pick up your place on your phone or tablet. As you may expect, you can upload your existing digital library, with options to use the S3 bucket connected to your ship, or put files directly in your ship's loom.
But why should you use this instead of whatever MEGACORP e-reader you are already using? This is where it gets good. %boox enables you to seamlessly share your books with your friends, directly peer-to-peer. No middlemen, no restrictions. Go to the "Collections" tab, enter the @p of one of your %pals, and browse their books. See the titles, authors, and cover images of their curated collections, and if something catches your interest just hit the grab button to pull it down to your own ship.
The last feature of %boox is... %last, which you will find is used to populate the "Feed" page. The %boox interface will prompt you to install %last separately; it's available over the network at:
|install ~matwet %last
Technically a different app, but with a native integration to %boox, %last is an implementation of the audioscrobble protocol, used by apps such as last.fm to help users find, process, and distribute information about the data they are consuming. In this case, ~sitful-hatred uses it for sharing what books you are reading with your %pals. If you want to share more than just what books you are reading, though, go to <ship-url>/apps/last and broadcast some verb<->data<->image tuple, like "~sampel-palnet is drinking coffee at Martha's Coffee" alongside a photo of your espresso. It will now show up in a feed to your %pals. Scrobble whatever you like, or even look at the %boox source code and add a %last integration to an app of your own!
Agentic Urbit
Every Urbiter who also wants to experiment with AI Agents inevitably says the same thing to themselves: "Please, oh please, don't make me use Telegram."
And of course the good people over at Tlon Corporation are working on relieving you of that nightmare by making Tlon Messenger more adaptable to agent chat interface needs. They are working hard implementing features like bot labels and thinking indicators, and the most straightforward way to experience these features remains just getting a Tlon hosted planet where they present you the most polished version of the experience.
Of course, since your urbit is yours, and you are reading this article about cutting edge experiences, maybe you are interested in a slightly less polished path. To that end ~malmux-halmex, on his weekends while taking a break from building Tlonbots on top of OpenClaw, built out an adapter for Nous Research's Hermes Agent. It is not a full release yet, but if you are already inclined to explore the agentic space and want more and more of your experiments to happen on your urbit, give it a shot.
The source work is currently in draft status as PR #26300 on the Hermes repo. Point your favorite LLM at it and ask to help you get started. If you get stuck, drop into ~sarlev's "Sovereign Compute" group (~sarlev/v3p046tv) and they will give you a hand. Both ~sarlev-sarsen and ~dinnyt-divsud have gotten it working for their specific use cases, along with some minor style and preference tweaks.
Personalized tools by Tlonners, for Tlonners
It might seem a little unfriendly to say, "Tell your agent to take this draft software across the finish line for your specific computing environment". You might be right. But you also... might be wrong. It might be the way to get ever more personalized software. For example, Tlon has been running their own experiments in this vein:
~sitful-hatredhas a system monitor for urbit ship operations~bitter-bitduchas a plane tracker for the aircraft near his house~dalwes-migdechas a tracker for her daughter's school lunch~rildun-lidlenhas a custom Are.na interface and algorithm
Each of these are hyper-bespoke, even approaching disposable, experiences that are at the same time tremendously useful to their owners.
Other agent-friendly updates
Also relevant in the world of Agentic Urbit are %claw and %mcp. Referenced prior in last week's %claw Developer Preview, and the April "This Month in Urbit" article, they are under active development and worth providing callouts here as well.
%claw, another project from ~sitful-hatred is an implementation of an OpenClaw-like agent natively inside your urbit. Available over the network:
|install ~matwet %claw
Just bring your own OpenRouter API key and you'll have all you need to control your own self-hosted agent, complete with its own memory, identity, and long-running sessions.
This month in MCP news, the urbit-mcp from Groundwire now comes with a quickstart script to get you running with a Groundwire-based comet and an automatically configured MCP <> urbit ship connection for Codex, Claude Code, or OpenCode:
curl -fsSL https://groundwire.io/install.sh | bash
They are also publishing a stable version over the network:
|install ~daplyd %mcp
News from across the network
To wrap up this month's updates, we share some introspective and explanatory writings from urbit contributors.
As the software landscape is consumed by agents, Urbiters are naturally thinking about what it means to have an agent-enabled operating system. ~lagrev-nocfep recently wrote a piece "Agential Urbit" which explores a radical rethinking of an agent-oriented Urbit. It explores alternative ways of thinking about identity, user interfaces, routing, and more. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in how the inner workings of Urbit might play with AI agents over time.
Another worthwhile writeup for the technically inclined is ~dozreg-toplud's writeup of Concurrent IO in Spider threads as a response to a question from ~bonbud-macryg about UrWASM functionality. A technical but interesting discussion, the format of which we hope to see more of as Urbit developers share their knowledge and experience with each other.
