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Chips

Architecture

Clients and harnesses connect to the same realtime edge. Harnesses come in through an open protocol, so any framework can join and enterprise data can stay in the customer’s own cloud.

flowchart TD
    subgraph clients["Clients"]
        D["Desktop · Tauri"]
        M["Mobile · Expo"]
        W["Web · React"]
    end
    subgraph harnesses["Harnesses"]
        A["Your harness<br/>a laptop, a VPC"]
        T["Tools · MCP, APIs, files"]
    end
    subgraph chips["Chips — cloud, or your own"]
        G["Realtime gateway<br/>WebSocket · resumable streams · REST"]
        S["Spaces · Runs · Policy · Notifications · Audit · Budgets"]
        L[("Event log<br/>the truth")]
    end
    D --> G
    M --> G
    W --> G
    A -->|Agent Connect| G
    A --- T
    G --> S
    S --> L

The gold edge is the product: Agent Connect is how any harness, running anywhere, becomes a participant. Everything inside the box can live in Chips Cloud or in a customer’s own cloud.

The boundary

Section titled “The boundary”

Chips decides nothing and executes nothing. It brokers decisions:

  • the harness asks;
  • policy decides whether a person is needed;
  • the person answers from whatever device is nearest;
  • the answer goes back to the harness, which does the work with its own credentials.

Chips holds the decision, never the credentials. That is the sentence to keep in mind when reading anything else here.

Nothing inbound is required

Section titled “Nothing inbound is required”

A harness opens an outbound WebSocket, or long-polls an updates endpoint the way a Telegram bot calls getUpdates. A harness on a Mac mini behind a home router works without a public address. One with a public URL can register a webhook instead.

Inside the server

Section titled “Inside the server”

chipsd is one Node process, with an inward dependency direction:

protocol → domain → application → infrastructure → interfaces

Storage, transport, media and fan-out are adapters behind ports, which is what lets the same binary serve a Mac mini and a cluster. The rule is enforced by dependency-cruiser in CI, and the current graph is in docs/architecture.md.