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NE Agents Day 2026 — Kourai Khryseai

Title: Kourai Khryseai: Transparent Human-on-the-Loop Multi-Agent Software Development

Author: AJ Barea, Rochester Institute of Technology (ajb6289@rit.edu)

Advisor: Dr. Leon Reznik

Venue: North-East AI Agents Day 2026

Date: Friday, May 8, 2026

Location: Jane Street, New York, NY

Downloads:

Kourai Khryseai conference poster — Transparent Human-on-the-Loop Multi-Agent Software Development, organized around Monitor / Communicate / Control pillars with a Hephaestus orchestrator, specialist agents, an OpenTelemetry trace showing HOTL pauses and a bounded repair loop, claim-driven evaluation, and one-backend-three-hosts screenshots

Abstract

Multi-agent coding systems are increasingly capable, but their coordination decisions are often opaque to the supervisor. Kourai Khryseai treats multi-agent software development as an interpretability problem and organizes the system around three pillars — Monitor, Communicate, and Control. A Hephaestus orchestrator routes requests to specialist agents for planning, coding, testing, style review, and commit synthesis. Every step is observable through OpenTelemetry GenAI spans and a streamed Forge transcript (Monitor); agents pause to request clarification when requirements are ambiguous (Communicate); and a bounded Kallos⇅Techne repair loop plus graceful degradation make recovery deliberate rather than an edge case (Control). The backend combines independent A2A-connected services, MCP-based tool use, shared local SQLite state, and end-to-end tracing through OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, and Prometheus. The same orchestration layer powers a CLI, desktop GUI, and visual-novel-style interface, enabling studies of interface and embodiment without changing backend logic. Claim-driven tests anchor each MCC property to a mechanism in code: transparency is treated as a systems property, not just a UX choice.

Keywords: AI agents, multi-agent systems, software engineering, human-on-the-loop, interpretability, observability

Try it

The full system is on GitHub at ajbarea/kourai-khryseai. Clone, set an ANTHROPIC_API_KEY in .env, and:

make setup        # uv workspace install
make up           # build + start all 10 agents + vn-bridge + observability
make cli          # interactive REPL

The three pillars (Monitor / Communicate / Control) map to verified code locations documented in Architecture → The Three Pillars. For agentic-coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Aider), the root AGENTS.md is the canonical entry point; make help enumerates every developer target.

Cite this work

@inproceedings{barea2026kourai,
  author    = {Arnaldo Barea},
  title     = {Kourai Khryseai: Transparent Human-on-the-Loop Multi-Agent Software Development},
  booktitle = {North-East AI Agents Day 2026},
  address   = {New York, NY, USA},
  year      = {2026},
  month     = {5},
  url       = {https://ajbarea.github.io/kourai-khryseai/research/ne-agents-day-2026/},
}

The repo's CITATION.cff is the machine-readable source — GitHub renders a one-click "Cite this repository" widget on the repo sidebar that exports BibTeX, APA, EndNote, and Zenodo formats.