FAQ

Does this slow my agent down?

The hook adds one round trip to 127.0.0.1:7878 per tool call. In practice that is dominated by the agent's own LLM latency. If you measure regressions, file an issue with timing data and a sample of the affected tool call.

Does it phone home?

No. The control plane binds to 127.0.0.1 only. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no remote service to contact. The CLI ships TypeScript source you can read.

Can I run it without Docker?

You can build and run the control plane natively (go build -o control-plane ./cmd/control-plane after building the Rust ledger). Most users prefer the Docker image because it bundles the Rust ledger staticlib for you and isolates the daemon.

Why not just use the harness's own permissions UI?

Two reasons:

1. Cross-harness consistency. A user on Claude Code + Cursor + Codex has three permission UIs with three different shapes. We give them one policy file, one ledger, one signer enrollment.
2. Audit. The harness's permission UI does not produce a tamper-evident record of what the agent did. The ledger does.

Why don't I get a popup when something risky happens?

Approval prompts in the hot path of an agent loop are user-hostile. Users reflexively click through them. We ship monitor mode by default so you can review activity in the dashboard between sessions and tighten rules at your own pace. See Policies.

Why a Merkle ledger and not just a log file?

Tamper-evidence and offline verification. Anyone with the public key + a leaf + an inclusion proof can prove the leaf was committed at a given sequence without contacting the daemon. A plain log file gives you neither.

Why three languages?

Each piece sits at the language's sweet spot: TypeScript for harness-facing CLI / TUI, Go for the HTTP service, Rust for cryptographic correctness. The ledger is in Rust because we want exactly one implementation of the verification path; it is linked into Go via FFI. See Architecture overview.

What's the license?

Functional Source License 1.1, with Apache 2.0 conversion after 2 years. See LICENSE in the repo. Any non-competitive use is permitted. The license auto-converts to Apache 2.0 two years after each release.

How do I report a security issue?

Use GitHub's private vulnerability reporting: https://github.com/openagentlock/OpenAgentLock/security/advisories/new. Do not open a public issue with reproduction details. See SECURITY.md.

What's coming next?

The status page lists what is shipped vs not yet implemented. Higher-friction signers (OS keychain, hardware key) come first; OIDC / RBAC / on-prem federation follows.