What Prevail is, and what it isn't
This issue exists so we have a canonical place to point new contributors and users when scope questions come up. It's pinned at the top of the issue list on purpose.
What it is
- A single-user terminal cockpit for hard personal decisions.
- Spawns the AI CLIs you already have logged in (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Ollama) in parallel, gets a verdict.
- Runs on your machine, against a folder of your own markdown.
- Designed for the engineer / operator / founder who already lives in a terminal and trusts AI enough to delegate but wants to keep their reasoning on disk in plain markdown.
What it isn't
- Not a SaaS. There is no hosted Prevail. You run it.
- Not multi-tenant. One install, one user, one vault. There is no permission system.
- Not enterprise-grade. No SAML, no RBAC, no SLA, no managed deployment.
- Not a replacement for your task manager or notes app. The vault is markdown; if you want a database-backed task manager, use one of the dozen good ones.
- Not a code editor. Prevail can edit your vault markdown, but for serious editing it spawns $EDITOR.
Why these constraints
A general-purpose council tool tries to be everything for everyone and ends up being a Swiss Army Knife that loses its blade. Prevail's scope is narrow on purpose:
- Council-as-a-decision-protocol stays clean if the surface stays single-user.
- The vault stays grep-able and portable because it's markdown, not a database.
- The CI stays small because the threat model is small.
- The codebase stays maintainable by one person because we don't pretend to be a platform.
What we want contributions for
- Better defaults (frameworks, lenses, prompt-engineering)
- New CLI bridges as new AI tools ship
- Better vault tooling (prune, backup, verify, dedupe)
- Better journal / decision-log distillation
- Documentation, docs/, examples
- Bugs (especially security bugs — see SECURITY.md for the private reporting flow)
What we don't want contributions for
- Multi-user / hosted mode
- Cloud-hosted vault
- A web UI (the TUI is the product)
- Replacing OpenTUI or Bun
- Bolted-on observability (Datadog, etc.) — debug.log is the canonical local debug surface
Where to discuss
- Use cases, vault patterns, lens design → GitHub Discussions
- Bugs and feature requests → GitHub Issues with the templates
- Security → GitHub Security Advisories only
What Prevail is, and what it isn't
This issue exists so we have a canonical place to point new contributors and users when scope questions come up. It's pinned at the top of the issue list on purpose.
What it is
What it isn't
Why these constraints
A general-purpose council tool tries to be everything for everyone and ends up being a Swiss Army Knife that loses its blade. Prevail's scope is narrow on purpose:
What we want contributions for
What we don't want contributions for
Where to discuss