14-year-old creates tool for AI agents to band together like a team

Fourteen-year-old Austrian developer Stanislaus Hees has created Autark, an open-source tool that organises AI agents into a team to handle ongoing tasks with less user prompting. A manager agent assigns work from an inbox, while other agents carry it out, report back and can ask questions when instructions are unclear.

Autark can connect to several coding assistants and local models, although support beyond Codex and Claude Code has not yet been tested in live use. Its agents run with the user’s machine privileges, without sandboxing, approval prompts or permission gates; the developers say tests have reached repositories, backups, SSH keys and environment files within minutes. Passwords and keys are encrypted, and users can run the software themselves, but Hees says it is not suitable for unattended access to sensitive systems.