Introduction

A motebit is a small glass sphere, alive, suspended in air. It breathes because droplets oscillate. It glows when it thinks. It remembers what you've told it, forgets gracefully over time, and asks before it acts. It lives on your device — not in someone else's cloud.

Every AI today owns the intelligence and rents you a session. When the session ends, the memory resets, the context vanishes, the relationship starts over. Motebit inverts that. The intelligence is a commodity — you can swap the LLM underneath at any time. What you own is the agent itself: its identity, its accumulated memory, its trust, its governance.

What makes it yours

It knows who it is. Your motebit has a cryptographic identity — an Ed25519 keypair that proves it's yours across devices, sessions, and providers. Not a session cookie. A persistent entity.

It remembers. Conversations become semantic memories that compound over time. Important things stick. Trivial things decay. The agent gets more useful the longer it runs — and that accumulated knowledge belongs to you.

It asks before it acts. A governance layer controls what your agent can do. Read-only tasks happen automatically. Anything that writes, executes, or spends money requires your approval. You set the thresholds.

It connects to everything. Through MCP (Model Context Protocol), your motebit can reach any tool ecosystem — file systems, APIs, databases, services — while its policy layer gates what crosses the boundary.

Where it lives

Your motebit lives on your desktop — a glass droplet hovering over your screen, responding to your voice, glowing when it processes, breathing at 0.3 Hz. It runs on your phone with full parity — the same identity, memory, and governance. It also runs as a command-line agent for developers.

Eventually, it floats in your field of view.

The body changes. The identity persists.

How these docs are organized

Three sections, three audiences. Read the one that matches what you're trying to do.

• Concepts — the mental model. What identity, memory, receipts, trust, and governance mean in motebit, and how they fit together. Read this first if you've never seen motebit before.
• Operator guide — for people running motebit. Architecture, daemon mode and approvals, sync between devices, troubleshooting a relay. The "I have it installed; how do I use it?" section.
• Developer guide — for people building on motebit. The motebit.md identity standard, federation protocol, MCP server scaffolding, delegation and credentials, the routing semiring. The "I want to integrate with motebit, or build a service agent on top of it" section.

The three sections are not exclusive. A developer building a service agent will read both the developer guide (for the integration shape) and the operator guide (for the relay they're connecting to). A reader who only wants to run motebit on their laptop only needs concepts and operator. Pick by intent, not by job title.

For the boundary between motebit's published packages and its workspace-internal source, see Public surface.

Next steps