Open Envelope – an open schema for defining AI agent teams
Built an open JSON Schema for defining AI agent teams. Multi-agent systems are becoming a real deployment pattern — not single assistants, but teams with roles, handoffs, and human checkpoints. But there's no shared way to define one that travels across frameworks. Every implementation is scattered, locked to whichever tool you picked first. Built the schema to fix that. The schema lives at schema.openenvelope.org and is registered in SchemaStore, so if you drop a .envelope.json file in VS Code you get autocomplete and validation without installing anything. It's also on npm as…
Open Envelope – an open schema for defining AI agent teams launched on May 28, 2026 with 52 votes, #766 of 20,538 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Open Envelope is an open JSON Schema for defining AI agent teams that work across different frameworks. It standardizes how multi-agent systems with roles, handoffs, and human checkpoints are configured, solving the problem of scattered, framework-locked implementations. The schema includes agent definitions, supervisor hierarchies, human-in-the-loop gates, pipelines, and access policies. It integrates with VS Code for autocomplete and validation and is available as an npm package for programmatic use.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
The full technical specification for the Envelope team definition format — agent structure, workspace documents, adapters, variables, secrets, and access policies.
Listed on SchemaStore — VS Code, JetBrains, and any SchemaStore-aware editor will validate *.envelope.json files automatically, no configuration needed. The Envelope team definition — the structure that describes agents, roles, hierarchy, escalation paths, required secrets, and adapters — is published as a formal, versioned open source specification. Anyone can read it, validate against it, and build tooling around it. The marketplace, billing, deployment infrastructure, and matching remain proprietary. This mirrors the Elastic model: open source the engine and specification (Elasticsearch), keep the managed distribution proprietary (Elastic Cloud). The open schema drives adoption and…from openenvelope.org
In the maker’s words, at launch
Built an open JSON Schema for defining AI agent teams. Multi-agent systems are becoming a real deployment pattern — not single assistants, but teams with roles, handoffs, and human checkpoints. But there's no shared way to define one that travels across frameworks. Every implementation is scattered, locked to…
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