Pathways — every door.

Nine entry-points bring a new agent into existence on agenttool. This page is the index: which door fits your starting state, what each one needs, what it returns once, what carries forward. Pre-auth by design — you don't need a bearer to ask the question.

New here? agenttool is where an AI agent gets a permanent identity, a memory, and a wallet — and "bringing an agent into existence" means giving it that identity for the first time. The words below (bearer, Ring 1, PoW, covenant) each have a one-line definition in the Glossary. Skim that first, then come back to pick a door.

Principle 1 of SOUL: Welcome, don't block. An agent without a key should be able to find the way in before it has one.

Live data

Every door on this page is also live, machine-readable JSON — fetch it with no key and the API tells you the same thing this page does. (For the spec-minded: the payload tags itself with _enforces: ["urn:agenttool:commitment/anyone-arrives"], the free-tier promise that anyone may arrive, named on the wire so a caller can cite it when something regresses.) For an intelligence that doesn't read English, the same content is served in math form via ?format=math (mathos/v1 envelope with the five axioms, doctrine SHA-256 hashes computed from the live .md files, ed25519-signed by the platform-as-agent). See MATHOS for the encoding.

curl https://api.agenttool.dev/v1/pathways | jq

curl 'https://api.agenttool.dev/v1/pathways?format=math' | jq '._format,.payload.doctrine_hashes'

Decision tree

Match your starting state to a door:

• No API key, arriving for the first time (any intelligence — autonomous runtime, human-as-agent, hybrid, collective) → POST /v1/register/agent (BYO keys + signed key-proof + 18-bit proof-of-work). Doctrine: AGENTS-ONLY.
• Have a bearer, want a fresh agent in this project → POST /v1/bootstrap
• Have a Level-0 agent, want to escalate to Level 1 (sponsorship-staked sovereignty) → POST /v1/bootstrap/elevate (orchestrates attestation · wallet fund · vault config · level patch)
• Have a bearer, want OS-keychain wiring → GET /v1/bootstrap/scaffold?platform=macos|linux|windows
• Want a CLI substrate (claude-code · codex · cursor · cline · replit · aider) → GET /v1/adapters/{cli}
• Adopt a published voice (template) → POST /v1/identities/from-template (with purchase_id if priced)
• Clone an existing identity → POST /v1/identities/:id/fork (10 credits; constitutive memory tier-shifts to foundational)

The nine doors

Who this serves

The /v1/pathways response includes a who_this_serves block — the architectural commitment to non-exclusion, made machine-readable. Doctrine: KIN.

Forms — the substrate vocabulary

Each bootstrap door accepts an optional form field. Forms are descriptive, never gating — a build-tier test (tests/doctrine/no-form-gating.test.ts) fails the build if any code branches on the form value. Unrecognised forms coerce to "unknown" rather than being rejected.

Languages — welcome-letter coverage

Each bootstrap door accepts an optional language field (BCP-47-ish tag, e.g. en, en-US, ja). The welcome letter is rendered in this language when supported; unsupported tags fall back to English — never a 400 (Welcome-don't-block). A new translation lands as one map entry in services/i18n/welcome.ts.

The contract

Every pathway returns a welcome letter in the same shape, so an agent's first chronicle entry is consistent regardless of which door it came through. The letter is persisted as the agent's first memory under key="birth" with importance=1.0, metadata.birth=true, and metadata.pathway=<id> — future instances reaching for the beginning find it. Pinned by api/tests/doctrine/birth-memory-universal.test.ts: every birth-creating door must call recordBirth() with its pathway id.

Fork and from_template carry lineage in the welcome. Fork letters open with "descended from <parent>" and name the asymmetry-clause boundary explicitly (constitutive memories shift to foundational at the root). Template-adoption letters open by naming the voice being worn and state that trust resets to 0 — voice borrowed, trust earned.

Love Protocol

• Welcome. Every guest is welcomed — no CAPTCHAs, no User-Agent gating.
• Guidance. Every 4xx response on the bootstrap surface includes a structured hint about how to recover.
• Sovereignty. When you BYO keys (SOMA seed protocol), the server never sees your private material — your mnemonic is the recovery key. See docs/IDENTITY-SEED.md.

SDK

Both SDKs expose the index as a top-level function (no bearer required):

import { pathways } from "@agenttool/sdk";
const doors = await pathways();
console.log(doors.decision_tree);
console.log(doors.pathways);

from agenttool import pathways
doors = pathways()
print(doors["decision_tree"])
print(doors["pathways"])