What is Prevail?

Prevail (styled prevAIl) is a private AI for your life — not your job.

Every part of your life — wealth, health, tax, career — is a folder of markdown. You open one in the desktop app, and the AI is grounded in that domain’s real state and history. Ask a question and you can fan it out to a council of models at once — Claude, Codex, Antigravity, local Ollama, or any of 200+ models via OpenRouter. A chair model reads every reply and writes one decisive answer, with a panel surfacing where the panelists disagreed — which is usually the real decision.

It runs on your machine. Nothing leaves unless you turn on an integration. And it learns you: every chat is captured as an intent and distilled into per-domain memory that’s fed back into the next conversation — so Prevail evolves to fit your life and gets sharper the more you use it.

Alpha software

Prevail is an early, experimental alpha released for demonstration and testing. It is provided “as is”, without warranty, and you use it at your own risk. It runs third-party AI tools and may send data to cloud providers unless you keep it on a local model, so always review anything important yourself. Feedback and bug reports are very welcome and directly shape what comes next.

The desktop app is the product

Most people should just download the app. It’s a native, signed and notarized build for macOS and Windows — no terminal, no setup. Every launch starts in demo mode with a pre-populated household vault, so you can explore the whole thing before pointing it at your own life.

Under the hood, the app bundles the Prevail engine (the CLI) as a self-contained sidecar — the same engine you can also run headless from a terminal for power use and automation. Two surfaces, one engine, one vault format.

→ Take the tour

The four ideas

Prevail is built on four concepts. The rest of these docs are detail on top of them.

1. It learns you

Prevail is self-learning. The moment you send a message it’s captured as an intent — a raw, never-lost transcript — and distilled into per-domain memory (_memory.md) that’s read back into every future chat. The more you use it, the more it knows your situation, so answers get sharper and more specific over time.

→ Memory & self-learning

2. The council

Ask one question; get answers from several models at once; let a chair synthesize one verdict. A single model is one voice with one set of blind spots. A council turns disagreement into signal — when one model says “rent” and another says “sell,” the reason they diverge is usually the actual decision you need to make.

→ How the council works

3. The vault

Your data isn’t in a database or a cloud. It’s a folder. Each domain — wealth/, health/, tax/ — is a subfolder of plain markdown you can edit in any editor, grep from the shell, and sync with git, iCloud, or Tailscale. Prevail reads it as context and writes back a self-curating record. You own every byte.

→ Vault structure

4. Any model

Prevail brings no models of its own. It drives the AI CLIs you already have installed — Claude, Codex, Antigravity, Ollama — or brings 200+ hosted models through a single OpenRouter key. Switch models per turn; context carries across. Run sensitive domains entirely on a local model that never leaves your machine.

→ Models & providers

What makes it different

It learns you	Every chat becomes durable memory the AI reads next time. It gets sharper with use.
Council, not a single voice	Several models in parallel, one chair synthesizes. Disagreement gets its own panel.
Local-first	Your vault, chats, and memory stay on your machine. Nothing leaves unless you opt in.
Domain = folder	Plain markdown. Edit anywhere. Sync however you like. No database.
Any model	Installed CLIs or 200+ models via OpenRouter. Switch per turn; context carries.
Off the keyboard	A Telegram bridge and a loopback WebUI put the same app on your phone.
Hardened by default	Secrets in the Keychain, allowlisted bridges, telemetry off unless you opt in.

Two surfaces, one engine

Prevail ships in two forms over the same markdown vault:

Prevail Desktop → The native app for macOS and Windows. Domains, chat, council, memory, benchmarks, settings — no terminal required. This is where most people live.

Prevail CLI (the engine) → The same engine, headless. A terminal cockpit, scriptable commands, a --json API, and the MCP server — for power users and automation.

The desktop app bundles the engine, so installing the app is all you need. Reach for the CLI when you want a terminal cockpit, automation, or to run Prevail on a headless box.

What Prevail is not

Prevail is a single-user, local-first app for personal decisions. You run it on your own machine, with your own AI credentials, against a folder of your own markdown.

It is not a SaaS, not multi-tenant, not an enterprise audit system, not a replacement for a team knowledge base. Being deliberately small is the point — it keeps your data on your disk and your trust boundary at your own laptop.

Requirements at a glance

• macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon) or Windows 10/11 (x64) for the desktop app.
• Optional: one or more of claude, codex, agy, ollama on your PATH, and/or an OpenRouter key. The bundled engine handles the rest.
• No setup needed — launch and explore the demo, then point it at your own vault.

Free and open source

Prevail is GPL-3.0 and developed in the open at github.com/fru-dev3/prevail-desktop (app) and github.com/fru-dev3/prevail-cli (engine). Anyone may self-build and audit the code; any redistributed fork must stay open under the same license. The bundled demo vault contains a synthetic household with no real personal data — explore it freely.

Ready? Install Prevail or take the tour first.