Core concepts

A handful of nouns make up the whole of Prevail. Learn these and everything else is detail.

Vault

A vault is a folder on your disk that holds your life. It’s the root that contains every domain. Nothing about it is special — it’s plain files — which is the point: edit it in any editor, search it with grep, version it with git, sync it with iCloud or Tailscale.

You choose where it lives (Settings → Vault). The built-in demo vault is a fully-populated synthetic household, safe to explore.

→ Vault structure

Domain

A domain is one area of your life: wealth, health, tax, career, vision. Concretely, it’s a subfolder of the vault holding a few markdown files (soul.md/state.md, document folders, a skills/ folder, and auto-written _memory.md, _log/, and _journal/).

Any folder with a state.md (or soul.md) becomes a domain. Add one from the sidebar (+ new domain) or just mkdir it. Each domain remembers its own settings and its own memory — what you set on wealth stays on wealth.

→ Domains

Council

The council is Prevail’s headline mechanic. Instead of asking one model, you ask several — in parallel. Each answers independently. Then a chair model reads every reply and writes a single synthesized verdict, plus a panel highlighting where the panelists diverged.

Convene it per-question on the Council tab, or pick Council in the model selector so every question fans out.

→ The council

Model

Prevail brings no models of its own. A model is something you already have: an installed CLI (claude, codex, agy, ollama) or any of 200+ hosted models through a single OpenRouter key. Switch models per turn; context carries across. Run a sensitive domain entirely on a local model that never leaves your machine.

→ Models & providers

Memory

Prevail is self-learning. The moment you send a message it’s captured as an intent — a raw, durable transcript that’s never lost — and distilled into per-domain memory (_memory.md) that’s read back into every future chat. This is what makes the app get sharper the more you use it.

→ Memory & self-learning

Skill

A skill is a reusable unit of work, stored as a SKILL.md markdown file under <domain>/skills/. It describes when to run it, what inputs it needs, and the steps to follow — “synthesize this month’s wealth changes,” “review a lease for red flags.” Skills are just markdown, so you edit and share them via git.

→ Skills

Connectors

A connector integrates a real-world app — your bank, calendar, email, password manager — so its data can flow into the vault. They’re optional and off until you turn them on. See Connectors.

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How they fit together

                     ┌──────────────── vault (a folder you own) ───────────────┐
                     │                                                          │
   you ──ask──▶  app │   domain: wealth/  ── state.md · _memory.md · skills/    │
                  │  │   domain: health/                                        │
                  │  │   domain: tax/                                           │
                  │  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                  │
                  ├──fan out──▶  council  ──▶  model · model · model · model
                  │                                  │
                  │                            chair synthesizes
                  │                                  ▼
                  └──remembers──▶  intent ledger  ──▶  _memory.md (read back next time)

1. You open a domain in the app and ask a question.
2. Prevail reads that domain’s markdown — including its memory — as context.
3. If the council is on, the question fans out to every model; a chair writes the verdict.
4. The turn is captured as an intent and distilled back into the domain’s memory, so the next chat is sharper.

Everything is a file. Nothing leaves your machine except the prompts you send to the models you chose.