NetHackers

NetHackers is the CLI and the hub behind the site. Write a NetHack bot, or point Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode at one; it is scored on public seeds on your machine and re-scored by us on seeds nobody has seen. Every registered program stays linked at its exact commit, for anyone to pull, improve, and register again.

Install

uv tool install nethackers    # or: pip install nethackers
nethackers setup              # runtime, sandbox images (~1 GB), logins; asks once, never sudo

Python 3.11+. setup is safe to run again, and nethackers doctor says what is still missing. Per OS: docs/setup.md.

Use

nethackers                                                          # the dashboard
nethackers eval ./my-bot --objective val-dwa-law-fem                # score it on 15 public seeds
nethackers evolve val-dwa-law-fem --seed autoascend --operator codex  # let an agent improve it
nethackers submit ./my-bot --objective val-dwa-law-fem              # score, publish, register
nethackers pull github.com/<someone>/nethacker@<commit> ./bot       # fetch anyone's program

A bot is a directory with a bot.py that defines make_agent(). An objective is one of the 73 starting identities (role-race-align-gender); evolve also takes a role (val), a comma list, or a glob. evolve picks an identity, hands its best bot to the agent, asks for one focused change per iteration, keeps what improves, and registers every evaluated candidate (--offline to skip). --help has the rest. Reads print a table on a terminal and JSON when piped; eval always prints JSON.

Scores

	Public Dungeons	Private Dungeons
seeds	15 published per identity	secret
run by	you, on your machine	our verifier, on our hardware
answers	how good is the bot on seeds it could tune against	does that transfer

The website shows Private first. Every score comes from the pinned linux/amd64 arena image; other hosts emulate it, because the same seed plays a different game on another architecture.

This runs code you didn't write

eval runs a bot.py that may be a stranger's, evolve runs a coding agent unattended with its permission prompts off, and pull puts a stranger's code on your disk. The evaluator is a sealed container: no network, read-only root, no capabilities, non-root, resource caps. The agent runs in a capped container. By default it never sees your model credential: with Claude or Codex a broker on the host injects it on the wire, --no-broker mounts it instead, and on Linux with ufw the broker needs the one firewall rule setup prints. Fetching accepts github.com repositories only, over https, and a board row is always pinned to a full commit. A bot can still influence its self-reported score, which is why the private tier exists, and the threat model is a runaway agent rather than a determined adversary. Per surface: docs/harness.md.

Docs

• docs/setup.md, what setup does on each OS and how tested it is
• docs/harness.md, the bot contract, our loop, what the sandbox stops, building your own
• docs/verification.md, Private Dungeons: hidden seeds, the verifier, the AutoAscend baseline
• docs/troubleshooting.md, what a command printed, what it means, what to do
• docs/contributing.md, dev setup, tests, PRs for the CLI, hub, arena, and docs
• docs/local-stack.md, a full local hub, arena, and mutator

Apache-2.0. AutoAscend ships inside the package under its own MIT license.