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Agent Filesystem Interface

A vendor-neutral specification for exposing any data source to AI agents as a filesystem-shaped interface.

  • Get started

    Understand what AFI is, then walk through building your first provider or client in under an hour.

  • Specification

    The normative draft. Operations, schemas, discovery, transports, conformance profiles.

  • Providers

    Adapter notes for existing systems: AgentFS, ChromaFs, supabase.sh, and a Cloudflare D1 sketch.

  • Community

    Governance, contributor ladder, AEP process, working groups. Vendor-neutral by design.

Why AFI

LLM agents are converging on filesystems as their primary interface for exploring information. ls, cat, grep, find — the muscle memory the model has from millions of code repos works just as well for docs, tickets, transcripts, and agent state.

Multiple teams in 2025–2026 shipped essentially the same primitive in isolation:

Project What it exposes Backing store Transport
Mintlify ChromaFs Docs Chroma vector DB In-process (just-bash)
Supabase supabase.sh Docs Markdown files SSH (just-bash)
Turso AgentFS Agent state SQLite FUSE / NFS
Vercel d0 filesystem agent Analytics Files in sandbox Bash tool

Each is genuinely useful. None can talk to each other. Every new adopter re-invents the same operations with slightly different shapes. Agents cannot be portable across providers.

AFI is the shared shape. Implementers become AFI providers; agents talk to any provider through the same small set of operations. The interface is transport-agnostic: MCP, HTTP, FUSE, and SSH bindings are all defined.

Standing on the shoulders of

  • CSI (Container Storage Interface) — "an interface, not an implementation" as the primitive that unlocks an ecosystem
  • LSP (Language Server Protocol) — proof that a small, well-scoped interface outlives its originating vendor
  • MCP (Model Context Protocol) — the transport AFI most happily rides
  • 9P / FUSE / POSIX — the mental model the standard borrows from

Status

AFI is in draft. The v0.1 draft is complete and open for review. Read the specification, open an AEP, or write an adapter note.