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Agent platforms connect directly to the brain over authenticated HTTP MCP; the brain owns durable records and workflow gates and provisions cloud sandboxes; agents run SSH commands and pull outputs; the frontend supervises the brain.

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Topology

Every agent client talks to one brain over POST /mcp (Streamable HTTP, JSON-RPC). The browser UI talks to the same brain over /api/…. There is no local proxy on agent machines. Byte transfers — artifact, storage, and feed uploads, sandbox output pulls — happen agent-side over presigned or token URLs, so the brain never receives a checkout root and never serves live checkout files.

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The brain, by layer

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State and storage

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Auth and tenancy

One Authorization: Bearer header; three credential shapes dispatched by prefix — session JWT, rr_sk_, mk_ — plus OAuth (DCR + PKCE) for interactive MCP clients. Project membership is the tenant boundary, enforced at the HTTP path gate and the MCP funnel. Local mode is auth-free. Details: Configure auth.

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Sandboxes

The brain provisions, leases, observes, and terminates; the agent holds the SSH key and runs commands. Every VM gets the same bootstrap (caller key + management key, rec.sh transcript wrapper, merv_run, then the ML toolchain). Ids are <provider>:<native_id> so operations route to the owning driver.

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Distribution

Canonical content lives in merv/ (skills/, agents/, bin/, adapters under clients/). CI publishes a generated merv-client branch and a merv-hermes-client repo after every change on main; marketplace manifests on main serve Codex, Claude Code, Copilot CLI, and Cursor; the runner is a backend-free zipapp at rapidreview.io/merv/runner/. Deeper: merv/docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and merv/docs/MODULE_BOUNDARIES.md in the repository.