Octopus Protocol: One-Shot Hardware Discovery and Control for AI Agents via Infrastructure-as-Prompts

Abstract

Bringing a previously unintegrated device under the control of an AI agent still requires device-specific engineering: driver selection, dependency resolution, interface design, and deployment, repeated per device and per platform. We present Octopus, a hardware onboarding framework in which a coding agent, rather than a shipped integration, is the runtime that produces the required infrastructure. Given shell access and a model API key, a single bootstrap command drives the agent through a five-stage pipeline that enumerates operating-system- visible hardware, infers device identity and capabilities, generates typed Model Context Protocol tools and the hardware-facing code behind them, and activates the result as a live endpoint. A persistent daemon then maintains the result, repairing defined classes of failure in the deployment it produced. Across four hosts spanning two processor architectures, three operating- system families, and two device-access paths, identical prose specifications produced working interfaces with no per-host edits and no hand-written integration code. Five consecutive runs on the reference host completed end to end on first attempt. We report both the resulting capability and a failure mode of unattended repair loops observed over eleven hours of continuous operation.