# Show HN: Nova – open-source AI orchestrator that works with you > Source: > Published: 2026-07-23 12:30:36+00:00 **A self-hosted AI team that runs your operation — and asks before it acts.** Nova is a self-hosted, open-source AI platform: a team of 24 specialist agents plus an automation layer that reacts to events and runs the repeatable work in the background. You reach it from Telegram, Slack, Discord, or a terminal — or a webhook, a metric, or a connector event fires it — and it runs on your own model subscriptions and your own machine, with human approval where it matters. [ Website](https://mynova.space) · [·](https://mynova.space/docs/) **Documentation**[·](#quick-start) **Quick start** **MIT license** ``` message ──▶ channel ──▶ relay ──▶ orchestrator ──▶ planner or (Telegram/ │ classify │ decompose into event Slack/ │ (heuristic → │ subtasks with (webhook, Discord/ │ pattern cache → │ dependencies) metric, terminal) │ LLM) │ connector) ▼ ▼ agent-router ◀── 24 specialist agents │ prepare ──▶ approve ──▶ execute (safe) (your gate) (ships/spends/sends) ``` **Multi-agent, not a chatbot.** 24 specialist agents (marketing, ops, data, legal, and more — each just a markdown file). A message is classified cheaply, then answered directly, routed to one specialist, or decomposed into a dependency-ordered plan run across several. An optional distributed**executive board**(7 reasoning personas) can deliberate on strategic questions.** Event-driven, not just a chat bot.**A message is one trigger; a webhook, a metric crossing a threshold, a connector event, or a semantic match is another. Any of them can run an agent or a**playbook**(a reusable SOP), and** durable processes**carry multi-day work across waits and restarts. Nova runs the operation in the background, not only when you ask.** Two-phase execution + governance.**For interactive requests the safe half — research, drafts, generation — runs freely; then an inline** Approve / Revise / Cancel**gate; only after you approve does the consequential half — publish, send, spend — run. Autonomous paths (schedules, automations) are pre-authorized and governed by spending caps, role-based permissions, and content policies that can hard-block. Agents also earn autonomy over time (a per-category ladder).**Your models, your machine.** It drives the official vendor CLIs (Claude Code, Gemini, Codex) as subprocesses, so it runs on subscriptions you already pay for instead of metered API tokens — and it also supports any OpenAI-compatible API (OpenRouter, DeepSeek, xAI, local Ollama/vLLM). It does**not** reuse or extract tokens. Storage is local split SQLite; embeddings run locally (all-MiniLM-L6-v2, 384-dim). Your keys, your data. MIT licensed. **Core orchestration** - 24 specialist agents + task decomposition with dependency resolution and parallel execution - Two-phase approval gate + an earned-autonomy ladder (ask → notify → auto-within-caps) - Persistent memory (facts, goals, tasks) with local semantic recall **Knowledge base (RAG)**— feed it PDFs, docs, and URLs; retrieved across agents with citations, on personal / team / per-agent scopes- Multi-channel: Telegram (primary), Slack, Discord, terminal ( `nova chat` /`nova connect` ); WhatsApp per-user **Workboards**— boards of typed cards with stages you define: create one with`nova workboard create` or ask a specialist agent to put a set of results on a board ("put these leads on a board"); agents fill and move cards, you drag them across stages in the dashboard, and a stage can optionally queue a playbook or agent task when a card enters it, behind the same approval gate **Business automation** **Playbooks**— reusable, versioned, parameterized SOPs** Automations**— an event (webhook, metric, connector, or semantic match) runs an agent or playbook, with dedupe, rate limits, retries, and a dead-letter queue**Durable processes**— multi-day flows that wait for a timer or event and resume, surviving restarts** Document extraction**— schema → strict, type-checked JSON from PDFs/DOCX** Connectors**— two-way Stripe, Shopify, Zendesk, HubSpot (read + write)** Connected data**— query HTTP JSON/CSV, read-only SQLite, or a connector read action** ROI reporting**— tasks automated, hours saved, and value vs. cost **Governance & hardening** - Compliance policies — spend caps, approval routing, and PII/content checks that can **hard-block**(prevent execution even after approval) - Role-based permissions (capabilities) and out-of-office delegation - Exactly-once idempotency, advisory locks (no double-fire), and AES-256-GCM encrypted secrets **Foundations** - 13 MCP servers (Notion, Google Workspace, Playwright, Cloudflare, ClickUp, GoHighLevel, Firecrawl, Tavily, Exa, and more) — called via **mcp2cli**, where agents discover tools on demand instead of loading every schema into context - 45 skills (image/doc generation, research writing, and more) invoked by agents as needed - Scheduler + proactive services (morning briefings, smart check-ins) - Voice — inbound and outbound calls via Twilio; voice messages transcribed with Groq or local Whisper - A unified `nova` CLI and a web dashboard Every incoming message is classified through three tiers, cheapest first: **Heuristic**— short, simple messages skip straight to the model (no classifier LLM call).** Pattern cache**— a request that matches a plan that worked before reuses it, skipping classification.** LLM classification**— only genuinely new, complex asks pay for a cheap classify call (simple / routed / complex). Complex requests are decomposed into subtasks with dependencies; independent branches run in parallel, each on a specialist agent with its own tools and MCP access. Consequential actions run in the **execute** phase, which waits for your approval (or runs under an earned autonomy grant with a spending cap). Prepared artifacts — copy, images, files — flow from prepare into execute. Nova connects to real accounts and can spend real money, so it's worth being precise about what protects you: **The approval gate is the default safety boundary — not a sandbox.** Sandboxed execution is**opt-in and off by default**: agent tools run unsandboxed on your host. A hardened Docker sandbox exists (`NOVA_SANDBOX_BACKEND=docker` ) but is not the default, and if Docker isn't installed it**falls back to unsandboxed** with a warning. Run it as a dedicated user / on a VPS, and turn on the Docker sandbox if that matters to you.**"Asks before it acts" is about interactive requests.** Things you set up in advance to run on their own — scheduled tasks, automations, and durable-process steps — are**pre-authorized when you create them** and run without a fresh prompt each time (that's the point of automating). The controls on those autonomous paths are the earned-autonomy ladder with**spending caps** and the**hard-block** compliance policies (which stop execution even there).**It's young and solo-built.**~390 unit tests across the suite, but no end-to-end tests of the full automation chain yet, and it's a broad surface for one maintainer. The connector set is a starter four. Read the code before you trust it with the keys. On top of the approval gate, four controls are **on by default**: least-privilege agent env (`NOVA_AGENT_ENV_STRICT` ), an egress leak firewall that redacts/blocks secrets leaving the system (`NOVA_LEAK_FIREWALL` ), an untrusted-input firewall that neutralizes tool/web/email content before it reaches an agent prompt (`NOVA_UNTRUSTED_FIREWALL` ), and a dashboard that binds loopback-only unless `DASHBOARD_PASS` is set. Run `nova doctor --security` to grade your deployment. ([Bun](https://bun.sh)`curl -fsSL https://bun.sh/install | bash` )- The CLI installed and authenticated (or another supported provider)[Claude Code](https://claude.ai/claude-code) - A **Telegram** account and a bot token from[@BotFather](https://t.me/BotFather) ``` curl -fsSL https://mynova.space/install | bash ``` That clones Nova to `~/nova` , installs anything missing (Bun, the Claude Code CLI), and launches a guided **setup wizard** (`nova init` ) that connects Telegram and an AI provider — no file editing, and it can auto-detect your Telegram user ID. The wizard is resumable. Prefer to clone yourself? `git clone https://github.com/djbelieny/nova.git && cd nova && bash bootstrap.sh` does the same. Just checking prerequisites?`bash bootstrap.sh --check` reports what's installed and changes nothing. ``` git clone https://github.com/djbelieny/nova.git cd nova bun run setup # install deps, create .env # edit .env with your tokens/keys bun run test:telegram # verify bot token bun run start # start Nova ``` After setup, one `nova` command runs everything: ``` nova start # start the relay (main process) nova chat # talk to Nova in your terminal nova connect # attach to a running Nova, with live activity + inline approvals nova dashboard # web dashboard nova doctor # health check nova init # (re-)run the setup wizard # capabilities nova kb add # feed the knowledge base nova playbook run # run a saved SOP nova automation add … # event → workflow nova process | data | roi | extract # processes, connected data, ROI, extraction # governance nova policy add … # spend caps, approval routing, content checks nova access grant … # role-based capability grants nova ooo set @teammate # out-of-office delegation nova connector set … # store connector secrets, encrypted at rest ``` The underlying `bun run