VAT stands for "Versioned, Addressable, Tasks".
- "Versioned" because you can track your tasks in source control.
- "Addressable" because each task gets an ID that you can use to reference (address) the task - ex: "vat-f1w"
- "Tasks" goes without saying
vat was in all honesty designed because agents need an easy way to claim work in a backlog without stepping on eachother's toes.
But vat is great for both agents and humans.
It's low friction, compact, and simple.
vat has two first-class forms: the Rust binary (the primary distribution) and the skill — a prose implementation an agent follows directly, with zero install. I built vat with vat, using the skill to operate the backlog before the binary was finished. Take a look at the backlog to see a good example of what a vat backlog looks like and the current state of the project.
Read more: the story behind VAT.
Install from crates.io with Cargo. The crate is published as vat-cli, and it installs a binary named vat:
cargo install vat-cliThe bare vat name was already taken on crates.io, so the crate is vat-cli — but the command you run is still vat.
To track unreleased main instead, install straight from the repo:
cargo install --git https://github.com/jmbeach/vatThis builds and installs the latest main. To pin a specific release, add --tag <version> (e.g. --tag v1.0.0).
Every tagged release also carries prebuilt binaries, attached as .tar.gz assets to the GitHub Release for that tag. The release workflow builds three targets:
aarch64-apple-darwin— Apple Silicon macOSx86_64-apple-darwin— Intel macOSx86_64-unknown-linux-musl— x86-64 Linux (statically linked)
The Linux binary is built against musl and statically linked, so it runs on any x86-64 Linux — including musl-based distros (e.g. Alpine) and older glibc systems — with no runtime libc dependency.
Download the archive for your platform, extract the vat binary, and put it somewhere on your PATH:
tar -xzf vat-v1.0.0-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gz
install -m 755 vat /usr/local/bin/vatNo-install option: hand an agent the vat skill and it operates a backlog using only file edits and git — no cargo, no binary.
At it's core, vat is just a markdown file that has single line entries for each task in the backlog. If the information needed to capture the task fully extends past one line, vat stores the rest of the information of that item in a file under backlog/items/<id>.md You can add tags to a backlog item using square brackets. Ex: [in-progress] or [by:jared].
The vat skill and cli support claiming tasks, creating them / assigning them ID's, completing them, etc.
Licensed under either of Apache License, Version 2.0 or MIT license at your option.
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