FAQ

Short answers for the recurring product questions. Canonical details live on the linked pages.

Does it work fully offline? Yes. That’s the default. Online is opt-in only, gated by a Privacy-Diff. Nothing leaves the stick without your explicit consent.

What hardware do I need? Depends on the tier; performance reality explains the bottlenecks.

Where do my API keys live? Passphrase-encrypted in the vault on the stick (Argon2id + AES-256). Never plaintext, never phoned home.

Council vs single model: when does the Council win? On review/decision tasks: “check this code/decision/risk and show me the dissent.” For “write me an email,” a single model is fine. The advantage is measured in evals, not asserted.

What is the Council trace? The auditable record: all first opinions, the peer ranking, and the marked dissent, plus the Chairman’s synthesis. See the trace.

Is it “zero trace”? No. It’s minimal-trace, honestly. No persistent user data on the host, but unavoidable OS artifacts exist and are documented. A compromised host is outside the protection scope.

Which models? Swappable seats; the default bundle is MIT/Apache-licensed (DeepSeek-R1-Distill, Qwen3). Gemma is opt-in due to its license.