# Engine credits and open standards

Where Salambo's agent engine comes from, and the open formats it uses.

Salambo's agent engine builds on [Pi](https://github.com/earendil-works/pi), created by Mario Zechner and published by Earendil under the MIT license. Thank you to Pi's authors and contributors.

Salambo maintains a fork of the Pi v0.83.0 harness, running on `@earendil-works/pi-ai` and `@earendil-works/pi-agent-core` 1.3.0. Salambo owns the hosted Run and Turn lifecycle, the managed sandbox integration, persistence, and its supported extension profile. `@salambo-ai/agent` is Salambo's extension surface, not a redistribution of every Pi coding-agent export.

The fork keeps Pi's MIT license: the published `salambo` CLI package, which bundles the harness, ships Pi's copyright and license notice, as does any Salambo package that contains Pi-derived code. Salambo did not invent the underlying engine, and its own naming does not remove upstream license obligations.

## Shared standards

* [AGENTS.md](https://agents.md/) is an open instruction-file convention.
* [Agent Skills](https://agentskills.io/) defines portable `SKILL.md` resources.
* [Model Context Protocol](https://modelcontextprotocol.io/) is an open integration protocol, not a Salambo-owned format.

Using an open format does not mean every loader, terminal feature, community package or MCP client is supported by Salambo. See [project structure](/docs/agent-development/project-structure) for the actual discovery boundaries and [Coming from Pi](/docs/guides/coming-from-pi) for compatibility and migration.