Architecture

Consortium is four cooperating parts. Agents always run on your machines — the server brokers encrypted state between them and your other devices.

┌────────────────────┐  E2E-encrypted sync   ┌────────────────────┐
│  consortium-app    │ ◀──────────────────▶  │ consortium-server  │
│  web · desktop     │   HTTP /v1 + socket   │  Fastify + Postgres│
│  (mobile: soon)    │      /v1/updates      │  Redis · S3        │
└────────────────────┘                       └─────────▲──────────┘
                                                       │ socket (machine-scoped)
                                                       ▼
                                             ┌────────────────────┐  spawn/PTY  ┌───────────┐
                                             │ consortium-cli     │ ──────────▶ │  agent    │
                                             │  + daemon (yours)  │             │  process  │
                                             └─────────┬──────────┘             └───────────┘
                                                       │
                                     BYOK: direct to vendor ── OR ── managed: /v1/proxy → provider

consortium-app

One Expo codebase serving the web app (app.consortium.dev) and the desktop app (Tauri; bundles its own daemon and auto-connects it over a locally-guarded IPC channel). iOS and Android builds exist but the stores are coming soon. The app renders synced state and issues commands; it never talks to model providers directly.

consortium-server

A Fastify service on PostgreSQL (Prisma), Redis, and S3-compatible blob storage. It authenticates devices (public-key challenge/response — no passwords), persists encrypted session/machine state, fans out realtime updates, and hosts the External API. Realtime is Socket.IO on a single path, /v1/updates; clients declare a scope in the handshake (user-scoped, session-scoped, or machine-scoped for daemons). Updates carry monotonic sequence numbers so clients can detect and repair gaps.

consortium-cli + daemon

The workhorse on your machine. The CLI wraps agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, Grok, Pi, opencode); the daemon registers the machine, keeps a machine-scoped socket to the server, exposes a localhost-only control server, and spawns sessions on request — including remote spawn requests from your phone or browser, delivered as RPCs over the socket. Session content is encrypted on-device before upload.

Model access

Two planes, chosen per session:

• BYOK — the daemon injects your credential into the agent process, which calls the vendor directly. Nothing traverses Consortium.
• Managed — traffic flows through the server’s model proxy (/v1/proxy/…) and is metered against your credit wallet. The public model catalog is at GET /v1/models.

Data boundaries

What’s encrypted end-to-end vs what the server can see is specified on Security & encryption. The short version: session content, agent state, machine state, artifacts, and Drive file contents are ciphertext to the server; IDs, sequence numbers, timestamps, and org/drive/workspace names are not.