# 🤡 Clown 🤡

Clown is a container-based, cloud-hosted agent runtime. You're gonna love it. Please hold your applause for our upcoming launch.

# Claune Code

Claune Code is the Clown agent shim for interacting with and/or supplanting third party terminal agent clients. Any resemblances to other products are purely incidental.

# Usage

Example commands:

```
clown start -p 8080 -workloads /data/brilliant/ -repo https://github.com/accretional/statue -logs /data/logs
```


```
clown run /data/brilliant/gitundoworkflow.json
```

```
claune
> 🤡 Welcome to Claune Code!
> Try "create a util cloud.py that..." 
```

```
claune "task"

claune -p "question"
```

```
claune --gemini -p "question" || claune --codex -p "question" && echo "gemini not installed"
```

## Clown's Claune Code Clound

Clown is not an agent unto itself: it is an agent runtime wherein Claune Code runs in special cloud development environments conforming to the respective Clound spec.

Want a sneak peek into our nascent Clound staging environment? Check out https://source.mplode.dev and https://brilliant.mplode.dev

Before we publish a full Clound specification we want to complete a couple other projects: agent authn/authz, container serving, and detached workflows. Our platform integrates these all with source control, project/swe management, and IDEs right out of the box. No funny business.

# FAQ

### Is this a joke?

Clown is crucial to our attempt to build a platform for superintelligence. But we think this will look like a toy application compared to what might be possible in just a year from now, and don't want to take ourselves as seriously as other purveyors of agentic sundries.

This thing isn't going to convert the planet into paperclips. It's a cage for synthetic programmers who are a dangerous mix of knowledgable, confident, persistent, and wildly incompetent. We spend money on them because we hate looking up how to center divs and create react apps. Our job as software developers is primarily to make screens flash in patterns that other apes see value in. 

Is it all just a joke, or is there real meaning in multitenant, untrusted computing? Would Pagliacci have designed delegative authorization libraries if it were the best way for him to put a smile on someone's face? Is it bad to joke? When the circus comes to town, it's hard to not take notice. The clowns dedicate themselves to making other people happy even if it means a life on the road without status, performing for deeply serious people who listen to podcasts about the Model Context Protocol. One seems preferable to the other 🤡

### Claune Code? Clound?? What???

Opportunities for naming this punchy only present themselves once or twice in a generation. But yeah, if it helps explain things:

* Clown's agent handles ingress, orchestration, and the runtime for specific terminal agents while abstracting their underlying details. Because some terminal agents have non-standard commercial licenses that make it unclear what can be modified or changed and what can't, and because we want a turn on the playground too, Clown also can fill the role of non-free terminal agents by implementing similar, or better, functionality.
* Clown is most useful in cloud environments where you are using multiple differents agents, possibly of different kinds, simultaneously. The Clound is what Clown uses to manage agents without burdening the user with the work to provision instances or organize tasks across agents. 

Clown also has the ability to run structured, persistent workflows, which are like scripts with LLM calls or LLMs setting arguments for scripts. Because these run and are edited in development instances, Clown itself comes with the tooling to  build, save, and organize these workflows too. Clown basically turns its environment into something more structured for agents to work within, possibly alongside you or with your coworkers.