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Keep and personal-agent apps

Written 2026-09-26. Personal-agent apps are a young, fast-moving category, so this page describes the layers and the trade-offs, not a particular product. If something here is out of date, please open an issue.

A personal-agent app is an application: a chat client, connectors to mail and calendar, task views, notifications. Keep is a runtime: sealed cells, policy, a vault and device-signed approvals. They sit at different layers, so the useful question is what each layer is good at and how they fit, not which is better.

What such apps typically provide​

  • A client people can open on a phone or in a browser, usually a chat surface with rich result cards.
  • Connectors to mail, calendar and documents, with a review step before an action is taken.
  • Durable work: plans, pause and resume, goals, page tracking and alerts.
  • A demo that runs on a laptop with no special hardware.
  • Their agent computer is commonly a container on the same machine, which is simple to run and is not a boundary against a hostile tenant.

What Keep provides​

  • The agent's computer is a microVM with its own kernel. The host applies a deny-all network policy before any guest work, and the run fails closed if it cannot be applied (confine.md, THREAT-MODEL.md).
  • Approvals bound to a device key: signed over the exact text with a challenge and an expiry (Secure Enclave in Solvor), not an in-app button.
  • Tenancy: users are scoped by token and the isolation is tested (TENANCY.md).
  • 60+ ready use cases for files people actually have, and a declarative way to add more (CONTRIBUTING-PACKS.md).
  • Honest evidence: the evidence class is software-test, not hardware-attested, and every surface says so (SECURITY-PROFILES.md).

Where Keep is behind today​

  • Setup. Sealed cells need a Linux host with KVM. scripts/keep-up.sh is the one-command path (tested with fake facts; a clean-machine run is still open, see TODO.md), and scripts/keep-demo-local.sh runs a clearly labelled, not sealed simulator on a laptop.
  • Clients. The web console and Solvor (macOS 26), which now has an in-app chat client ("Agent Home"). No iOS or Android app.
  • Connectors. A browser-tab email reader in Solvor, plus a first-party Google mail/calendar connector in the runtime (OAuth, per-person or shared credentials; see connectors/README.md), live-verified against real Gmail and Calendar.
  • Long-running personal work. Sessions with steer, cancel, resume and hibernate, plus schedules and triggers, and a goal/plan interface in Solvor (a visual timeline for a proposed or accepted plan's steps).
  • Protocols. An HTTP API, an MCP endpoint, signed webhooks, and AG-UI (POST /v1/agui, see AGUI.md; tried with the repo's own chat page, not yet with a third-party AG-UI client).

How they fit​

An app needs a computer for its agent; Keep is a sealed one. The direction is to make that easy without either side pretending to be the other: an agent-UI protocol endpoint on the Keep runtime so chat clients can drive a Keep session, and an adapter that lets an app run its agent computer on Keep instead of a local container. Neither exists yet (TODO.md and ROADMAP.md track them). Nothing here has been agreed with any other project.