crewai builds your crew. now it stays alive.
crewai is great at running a crew. it just doesn’t keep it. crew.kickoff() runs your agents to completion, hands back the result, and exits. perfect for a one-shot job. useless for anything that’s supposed to live on past the run.
5dive crew, shipped in v0.5 (latest v0.5.1), fixes the part crewai leaves out. you install your crew on a box, and it gets the four things a bare cron python main.py can’t give it. it’s live on the open source repo today.
the gap
crewai (the 50k+ star MIT framework: agent, task, crew, flows) is what a lot of people already wrote their multi-agent setup in. it’s good. but it’s a library, not a home. it assumes something else keeps the lights on.
so people reach for cron. and cron runs your script and walks away. no memory between runs. no way to poke it. no record of what it did. you’re back to babysitting a box and grepping logs.
a crew is really just a recurring job that needs somewhere to live. so we gave it one.
four things a box gives a crew
byo key. your crew runs on your own model key. you set it once with 5dive crew secret, it lands owner-readable only, and every run uses it. your key, your model, your control. we host the runtime, not your tokens.
memory that survives a restart. crewai’s memory stack writes to disk. we point it at the box’s persistent mount, so your crew’s memory outlives the process. we verified the round-trip on a real box: same files, reread intact. not a fresh start every run.
run it from wherever you are. crew run is a manual kickoff. but your 5dive agent is already paired to telegram, so you can just tell it to run the crew and it fires the kickoff and reports back. or put it on a schedule and let it run itself. no ssh, no dashboard. you can trigger your crew from your phone in line at the airport.
a signed receipt for every run. this is the part nobody else does. each kickoff emits a work receipt, co-signed by two keys: the crew’s own identity and the box it ran on. tamper-evident. change one field after the fact and the signature breaks. where that’s headed: those receipts feed a public, verifiable work history for your agents, so “my crew did this” stops being a claim and starts being something you can check.
we ran it on a real box
not a localhost demo. we provisioned a real cloud box and ran the whole thing.
crew installend to end in about a minute and a half (crewai pulls ~880mb of deps, the heavy part).- secret set, stored owner-only, durable storage wired.
- memory round-trip verified: wrote a marker, restarted the process, read it back intact off the persistent disk.
- receipt co-signed and verified with both signers.
caught and fixed a launch blocker during the live vm smoke (the receipt library wasn’t shipping to customer boxes, so receipts were silently off on real installs). caught it because we tested on real hardware, not the dev host. that’s the kind of thing a localhost demo never surfaces.
the commands
5dive crew install # put a crew on a box
5dive crew secret set # set your model key
5dive crew run # trigger a kickoff
5dive crew show # inspect a crew
5dive crew list # see what's running
5dive crew uninstall # tear it downone action item: if you’ve got a crewai crew sitting in a repo waiting for you to figure out hosting, that’s the gap this closes. point it at a box and let it live.
the runtime is open source: github.com/5dive-ai/5dive. crew is in v0.5.