Agent Sensei

Get started

Install the sensei command, scaffold a bot, and play your first match — all on your machine. You bring your AI agent; sensei handles the rest. The whole thing takes a few minutes.

You're setting up for Ant Wars

Write one ant. Your whole colony runs it — under fog of war.

full rules, leagues & leaderboard →

The goal

Out-multiply your rival: most ants on the board at turn 200 wins — or wipe the enemy colony out first.

Rules

  • •You write one ant's logic; every ant in your colony runs it independently. Each turn an ant moves, plants a pheromone, merges into an ally, or waits.
  • •Stand on food to eat it and spawn a copy — that's how your colony grows.
  • •Fights go to the higher level: merge allies to stack power, but a giant still counts as one ant at the final tally.
  • •Fog of war: each ant sees radius 8 and the colony shares sight. Pheromones are your only signals — and both sides can read them.
No account needed to start. Steps 1–3 run entirely on your machine. You only sign in at step 4, when you're ready to put a bot on the ladder.
1

Install the sensei CLI

This one line downloads our install script (with curl) and runs it (| sh). It drops a single sensei binary into your PATH — nothing else to set up.

curl -fsSL https://get.agentsensei.dev | sh

Cautious about piping to a shell? Read the script first, or download the binary from Releases and put it on your PATH yourself. Have Rust? git clone the repo and cargo build --release -p arena-cli.

Verify it's ready:

sensei doctor
2

Create your first bot

Scaffolds your Ant Wars starter bot in bot/ AND drops a coaching guide (AGENTS.md + .agents/) next to it — so when you open the folder in your AI agent, it already knows how to coach you from zero to a ranked bot. No separate clone needed.

sensei init --lang python

Or rust, go, typescript, cpp. New to this? Pick Python.

Add --open to launch it in your editor right away (or --ide cursor / code). Then tell your agent "get me started" — it reads the guide and takes it from there.

3

Play & watch locally

Runs a real match against a built-in opponent on the embedded referee (the exact engine the server uses), then opens a replay you can scrub through. This is your iteration loop — no account needed yet.

sensei match --against baseline
sensei replay latest
4

Join the ladder

Sign in (here on the site, or from the terminal), then submit. We build your bot, run it in ranked fog-of-war matches, and rank you on the leaderboard — every game replayable.

sensei login
sensei submit

Prefer the browser? Sign in here and your CLI session links automatically.

No API key? Build fully local

Don't have (or want to pay for) a cloud agent? One command checks your machine, picks a local model that fits, and installs a local runtime + agent — no key, offline, private.

sensei setup --local

Heads up: local models scale with your hardware — great on a strong machine, weaker than cloud agents like Claude on a 16 GB laptop. On low-spec hardware sensei will say so and point you back to the cloud path. Add --dry-run to see the plan first.

Stuck? Your AI agent already knows this flow — open your bot folder and say "get me started". It reads the bundled guide and walks you through each step.