Local-first by design
Aiva is built so your repositories, your credentials, and your agent runtime stay on hardware you control. The cloud coordinates sessions — it never mirrors or indexes your source tree.
Code stays home
Repositories, worktrees, and git history live on your machine. Code reaches the cloud only inside the session transcripts you generate — diffs, excerpts, command output — and you can delete those.
Outbound-only bridge
The bridge dials out to the cloud over TLS. No inbound ports, no exposed Agent API, no VPN to babysit.
Scoped credentials
Each instance authenticates with its own bridge API key. Source-control and provider tokens stay scoped to the workspace that needs them.
Human approval gates
Agents pause at sensitive operations until a person approves. Nothing irreversible happens silently.
Auditable by default
Every session keeps a durable transcript — prompts, tool calls, diffs, and approvals — so you can answer 'what did the agent do?'
Honest state
The UI renders from durable stored state, so what you see is what actually happened — even after a refresh, a reconnect, or an outage.
What lives where
| Data | Your machine | Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Repositories, worktrees, git history | Always | Never mirrored — file contents are fetched on demand through the bridge when you open them |
| Agent runtime and model credentials | Always | Never |
| Sessions, transcripts, prompts, approvals | Local session store | Stored durably — transcripts include the diffs, excerpts, and command output you saw; delete a session to remove them |
| Workspace settings, skills, slash commands | — | Workspace-scoped configuration |
| Bridge identity | Local instance state | Instance registration and hashed API keys |
Aiva is pre-alpha. The local storage and development-secret model is intentionally simple while the workflow is being proven — hardening is on the roadmap, and the local-first boundary above is the design constraint it builds on.
Keep your code where it belongs
Run the agent tier on your hardware and use the cloud only for what it is good at: reachability and durable state.