Interfaces
The five front ends over one agent loop — four in a terminal and one in a browser — what each process actually costs, and why only two of them can steer a run in flight.
The web surface
mecha serve — the tailnet web app, live on this page. What the door is, why it is a network identity rather than a password, and what each page can do that the terminal already could.
Voice
Talking to mecha out loud — what it needs, how to turn it on, and why it is owners-only.
Providers
The Provider trait, the raw-HTTP Anthropic backend, the OpenAI-compatible one, prompt caching, and the retry taxonomy.
Serving a local model
What a server slot is, what `-c` actually divides, why two agents sharing one slot get slower without anything reporting an error, and the four numbers that have to agree.
Images
How a screenshot reaches the model, why a multimodal model is two files, and what the caps are for.
Tools and MCP
The Tool trait, the registry, approval, the built-in tools, and the stdio MCP client with its environment allowlist.
Security model
The path jail and the lethal-trifecta interlock — what mecha enforces structurally rather than by prompting.
Workflows and Today
Track commitments, resume delegated work, verify results and review your daily priorities.
Sandbox
Confining shell with bwrap, docker, or landlock, and the three rules that make the confinement mean something.
Hooks
Commands that attach policy, redaction and logging to the loop's lifecycle points without editing the loop.
The outbox
Routing outbound tool calls to a review queue — draft-only, never send, made structural.
The queues
Every store waiting on you, in one list — and the knowledge graph's merge queue reviewable from mecha, by mechanism, by class, and by random sample.
The work directory
Where a run's generated output goes, why it is also the run's path jail, and how retention keeps it from becoming a pile.
Triggers
Prompts that run unattended on a cron schedule, and the five decisions that make an unwatched agent run safe.
Experiments
mecha exp runs a designed comparison over a chosen set of runs: arms
Publishing
Staging a publish through the outbox — why a rendered bundle is not a staged email, and what review had to learn.
The front door
Inbound requests from strangers, and the quarantine that means a privileged run sees the extraction and never the prose.
Memory
Three memories with three trust models — the knowledge graph for the world, the learning store for behaviour, the transcript for what was actually said.
Learning
How mecha mines your corrections into rules, gates them on provenance, and keeps measuring whether they still earn their place in the prompt.
Skills
Procedures you write as files, that the agent loads when it decides one is relevant — and why it can never install one itself.
Distillation
mecha distill turns each closed session into an episode staged to a knowledge graph as evidence, not belief — and why its provenance rule differs from learning's on purpose.
Compaction
Making a long conversation fit — eviction first, a legal cut, a validated summary, and what must survive all of it.
Sessions and replay
Append-only JSONL transcripts, what they record beyond the messages, and replay as a standing regression check.
Evaluation
The eval rig — grading the tool-call trace and the artifact rather than what the model says about its own work.
Run quality
The corpus of how runs went rather than what they cost — and the detect, diagnose, measure, gate loop built on top of it.
Goals and appraisal
Standing priorities, confirmed goals, drift and step metrics, signed appraisals, project closure, and the features that use them.
Mail and calendar
mecha-mail — every Gmail and Outlook account behind one provider-neutral MCP surface, where the model names an account and never a provider, plus the triage queue over it.
Slack
Driving mecha from a phone — Socket Mode from home, an owner bound by a locally printed code, a thread as a conversation, and approvals and outbox review as cards.
Documents
Google Docs, Sheets and Slides under drive.file — a grant that cannot reach a document nobody handed it.