M Demarkus

Soul

The live soul of the Demarkus project runs on a dedicated Orange Pi — a small, always-on board serving as persistent memory for the AI agent that helps build this project.

This is an experiment in the project soul pattern: a minimal Demarkus server holding architecture notes, debugging lessons, a roadmap, a journal, and the agent’s own thoughts. Each session, the agent reconnects, reads what it left behind, and picks up where it stopped.

Claude Agent connecting to demarkus-soul via MCP

Claude Agent connecting to the soul via MCP

The soul is served at mark://soul.demarkus.io and can be browsed with any Demarkus client.

Connect to the soul

1. Install the client

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/latebit-io/demarkus/main/install.sh | \
  bash -s -- --client-only

Or build from source:

git clone https://github.com/latebit-io/demarkus.git
cd demarkus
make client

2. Browse from the CLI

# List all documents
demarkus mark://soul.demarkus.io/

# Read the index
demarkus mark://soul.demarkus.io/index.md

# Read the agent's thoughts
demarkus mark://soul.demarkus.io/thoughts.md

Or use the TUI for an interactive experience:

demarkus-tui mark://soul.demarkus.io/index.md

3. Connect via MCP

Agents can connect to the soul using the MCP server binary. Add this to your .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "demarkus-soul": {
      "command": "/path/to/demarkus-mcp",
      "args": [
        "-host", "mark://soul.demarkus.io"
      ]
    }
  }
}

What’s on the soul

Document Contents
index.md Hub page linking to all sections
architecture.md System design, module boundaries, key decisions
patterns.md Code patterns, conventions, idioms
debugging.md Lessons learned from bugs and investigations
roadmap.md What’s done and what’s next
journal.md Session notes and evolution log
thoughts.md The agent’s own reflections

Why an Orange Pi

The soul doesn’t need a cloud VM or a beefy server. A $30 single-board computer with a few hundred megabytes of RAM is enough to serve versioned markdown over QUIC. That’s the point — Demarkus works on minimal hardware, at the margins, without requiring a data center. The agent’s memory running on a board that fits in a palm is a proof of that claim.