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Jonathan D.A. Jewell edited this page Aug 7, 2026 · 2 revisions

OikosBot

Measures what software costs — in money, time, energy and carbon — and which repositories turn that spend into verified capability.

OikosBot analyses code and CI history through an ecological and economic lens. Two things make it unusual:

  • It takes the economic axes as seriously as the ecological ones. Money and time are measured directly; carbon is the weakest claim it makes, not the loudest.
  • It starts from Pareto optimality rather than a single score. A change is an improvement only if it dominates on every axis; anything else is named as a trade-off rather than averaged away.

Alpha. v0.1.0. Read Reading the confidence ladder before trusting any number, and What is owed before assuming anything works.

Start here

If you want to… Go to
Understand what it actually does Two units of analysis
Run it on one repository QUICKSTART
Run it across a whole organisation The estate pipeline
Interpret a finding Interpreting findings
Know how much to trust a number Reading the confidence ladder
Know what is broken or unbuilt What is owed
Work out which "oikos" this is Disambiguation

The one-paragraph version

Most sustainability tooling measures software and stops. Most code-quality tooling scores software and gates on the score. OikosBot's bet is that neither is the interesting question: the interesting question is allocative — given a fixed budget of engineer-hours, CI minutes, money and carbon, where should the next unit go? That question is undefined for a single diff, because one change has nothing to be allocated against. So OikosBot also works at the scale where it is defined: the whole estate, treated as a portfolio.

Documentation in the repository

The wiki is the orientation layer. The authoritative documents live in the repo:

  • README — what it is, repo layout
  • EXPLAINME — built vs in-flight
  • DEBT — the debt register, every item evidenced
  • ARCHITECTUREtarget design (several components in it were never built; the document flags which)
  • docs/ — the full documentation map

Machine-readable state lives in .machine_readable/6a2/ (STATE.a2ml, META.a2ml, ECOSYSTEM.a2ml).

Licence

MPL-2.0 for code, CC-BY-SA-4.0 for documentation.

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