Frequently Asked Questions

Honest answers to the questions CEOs, founders, and operators ask about AI adoption and the Cerevisor harness.

About the Harness

What is the Cerevisor harness?
Cerevisor is a desktop app for building, running, and refining multi-agent AI workflows on a visual canvas. You compose your own agents, hand work between them, and keep humans in the loop wherever judgment matters. It runs on your machine and talks directly to the AI providers you already use.
Who is it built for?
Operators, founders, consultants, and small teams who want AI inside their daily workflows without hiring an in-house ML team or signing a year-long enterprise contract. It is designed for people who think in workflows: ops leads automating internal processes, founders building product features, consultants packaging repeatable expertise. You do not need to write code, but the canvas does not get in your way if you do.
Is this a SaaS product or a desktop app?
Desktop app. The harness runs on Windows and macOS, on your machine. There is no Cerevisor cloud account to provision, no team workspace to manage, and no server-side runtime in the path of your runs. You bring your own provider keys; we never see them.
How do I get started?
Download the installer for Windows or macOS, run the guided onboarding, and try the prebuilt agents. You will be running your first multi-agent workflow within minutes. Add your provider API keys when you are ready to use your own models. The app is in active alpha, free to start, with a 7-day full Pro trial.

Privacy and Security

Where does my data go when I run a workflow?
From the harness on your machine straight to the AI provider you chose for that agent: Anthropic, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, Ollama, Codex CLI, or whatever else you wired in. Cerevisor servers are not in that path. We do not see your prompts, your runs, or your outputs.
Where are my provider API keys stored?
Locally on your machine. They never leave the device, they are never transmitted to Cerevisor, and we could not retrieve them if asked. Removing the harness removes them with it.
Are my workflows or runs uploaded anywhere?
No. Workflows live as .cerevisor files and worlds live as .cerevisor-world files on your disk. Run artifacts (NDJSON audit logs, outputs, intermediate state) stay local. Nothing is synced to Cerevisor unless you explicitly export and share it yourself.
What about audit trails for compliance and reviews?
Every run produces an NDJSON audit log on disk covering every prompt, tool call, model response, and approval. You can replay a run end to end, diff today against last week, and answer 'why did the agent do that?' from data instead of memory. The files are yours, in a format you can pipe into whatever compliance or analytics tooling you already use.
Can I run it offline with local models?
Yes. Point an agent at Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible local endpoint and the workflow runs without an internet connection. You can also mix local and cloud providers in the same workflow when you want privacy on some steps and frontier capability on others.

Models, Providers, and MCP

Which AI providers does the harness support?
Anthropic (Claude), any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (OpenAI, Groq, Together, OpenRouter, Azure OpenAI, and similar), Ollama for local models, and Codex CLI for terminal-based coding agents. Adding a new OpenAI-compatible endpoint is a configuration change, not a rewrite.
Can I mix providers inside one workflow?
Yes, and that is one of the main reasons to use a harness. Use a frontier model for planning, a fast cheap model for extraction, a local model for sensitive steps, and a specialist model for code review, all in one workflow. Each agent picks its own provider.
How does MCP work in Cerevisor?
The runtime is MCP-aware out of the box. Plug in any MCP server (filesystem, browser, database, custom internal tools) and your agents can call them as tools without you writing glue code. Every MCP call shows up in the audit trail like the rest of the run.
Will the harness be outdated in six months as models change?
The model landscape changes fast and the harness is built for that. It does not lock you to one provider, and adopting a new endpoint or model is a config change, not a rewrite. The runtime is updated regularly to keep up with new providers, MCP servers, and tool patterns so your workflows keep running on the best model for the job.

Pricing and Value

What does it cost?
Free to start, with a 7-day full Pro trial that unlocks every paid feature on real work. Paid pricing is published on the pricing page and is built around individuals and small teams, not enterprise procurement. No implementation fees, no required engagement. You pay for the harness; you pay your AI providers separately for model usage.
Why pay for the harness instead of using ChatGPT or Claude directly?
One-prompt chat tools are great when one model with one prompt is enough. Real workflows almost never are. You typically need a planner, an extractor, a writer, a reviewer, and a router; you need to call tools and MCP servers; you need to replay what happened. Bolting that onto a chat UI means reinventing the orchestration layer. The harness ships that out of the box.
Why use the harness instead of stitching together our own multi-agent setup?
You can. Going DIY means writing glue code, debugging context plumbing, building your own audit trail, wiring up MCP servers, and maintaining all of it. Teams spend months on this and end up with something that works for one workflow and is fragile beyond it. The harness gives you a working canvas, multi-model orchestration, NDJSON audit logs, and an MCP-aware runtime on day one. You bring your own provider keys and your own logic; the plumbing stays predictable.
Are there founding-user prices?
Yes. Subscribing during the alpha locks in founding-user pricing for life, even when standard pricing rises later. The harness is in active development and feedback from early users actively shapes the roadmap.

Why a Harness

Why use the harness instead of hiring AI engineers?
Hiring is the right move when you have a long-running product surface that demands deep custom infrastructure. For most operators the constraint is not engineering capacity, it is iteration speed on workflows. A senior AI engineer in Western Europe runs EUR 80,000-150,000/year before benefits and equity, and 6-12 months to ramp. The harness lets a small team run multi-agent workflows on day one, with the option to layer in custom code where it actually matters. Use it alongside engineers, not instead of them.
Why not just stick with a single AI chatbot or a one-agent tool?
One-agent tools are fine when one model with one prompt is enough. Real workflows almost never are. You typically need an architect to plan, an extractor to read, a writer to draft, a reviewer to check, and a router to decide what runs next. Bolt those onto a chat UI and you end up reinventing the orchestration layer. The harness is built for that from the start: visual canvas, per-agent provider override, skills library, and a full audit trail of every run.
What makes the Cerevisor harness different from other agent platforms?
Three things. First, it runs locally on your machine, so prompts, runs, MCP traffic, and provider keys never reach Cerevisor. Second, it is provider-neutral by design: Anthropic, Ollama, OpenAI-compatible endpoints, and Codex CLI all work, and you can mix providers per agent in one workflow. Third, every run lands as an NDJSON audit trail you can replay, diff against last week's, and answer 'why did the agent do that?' from data, not memory.

Support, Updates, and Lock-in

What happens after I subscribe? Am I locked in?
No. Cancel anytime from the Lemon Squeezy customer portal and you keep Pro through the end of the period you have already paid for. The first paid purchase has a 14-day money-back request window. Workflows and worlds live as plain files (.cerevisor and .cerevisor-world) on your machine, so even if you stop subscribing, what you built is still yours to version, share, and re-run.
Do I get updates and bug fixes after I install?
Yes. Cerevisor is in active alpha with regular releases. Updates ship through the desktop app and you receive them for as long as your subscription is active. Founding-user pricing locks in for life when you subscribe during the alpha, so future price changes do not affect you.
Can I share workflows with my team?
Yes. Workflows and worlds are plain files on disk, so sharing is whatever your team already does for files: a shared drive, a git repo, an attachment in chat. Provider keys stay on each person's machine, so teammates use their own credentials when they re-run what you sent.
How do I report a bug or request a feature?
Email [email protected] or use the contact form in the footer. Alpha members get a direct path to the team, and feedback actively shapes the roadmap. If something breaks, we want to hear about it.