Overview
Twenty of the most-asked general questions about rousseau-agent. See also FAQ: Security, FAQ: Providers, FAQ: Transports.
Questions
1. What is rousseau-agent?
A self-hosted coding assistant that runs as a single static Go binary. It ships a Bubble Tea TUI, a SQLite session store, nine chat transports, five LLM providers, an MCP server, and a cron scheduler.
2. What isn't it?
- Not a SaaS product.
- Not a wrapper around a hosted broker.
- Not a chatbot framework — the agent loop, tool registry, and approver are load-bearing.
3. Who is it for?
Operators who need the workspace, auth material, and model traffic to stay on a machine they control. Regulated environments, airgapped shops, individual operators who want IDE-optional coding.
4. Do I need a Kubernetes cluster?
No. The reference deployment is rootless Podman + a systemd Quadlet unit on a single host. There's a Deployment shape for Kubernetes if you want it, but there's no operator or CRD.
5. What LLM does it use?
Any of five backends: claudecli (default, inherits Claude Code auth), anthropic, bedrock, vertex, or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint (openai, openrouter, ollama).
6. Does it require an API key?
Not with the default claudecli provider — that inherits your local claude CLI's OAuth. For the other providers, yes: an API key or cloud credential.
7. What OSes are supported?
Rousseau runs natively on macOS, Linux, and Windows. The Podman reference deployment is Linux-first; on Windows use WSL 2.
8. Does it phone home?
No. There is no telemetry endpoint, no license server, no crash reporter. govulncheck at build time is the closest thing.
9. How do I install it?
Three paths: go install, from source (make build), or a signed release archive. See Quickstart.
10. Where's the config file?
~/.config/rousseau/config.yaml by default. Override with --config or XDG_CONFIG_HOME.
11. Where's the state stored?
~/.local/share/rousseau/sessions.db (SQLite). WhatsApp pairing lives in whatsapp.db next to it.
12. Can I run more than one transport at once?
Yes. Each transport is a separate subcommand — run them under separate systemd units, they all share the session store. WhatsApp and Slack can run in parallel.
13. Does it support voice notes?
WhatsApp only, via optional whisper.cpp integration. Set whatsapp.voice.enabled: true and install whisper.
14. How does the session store work?
SQLite with WAL. Every message is persisted immediately. Cross-session recall uses SQLite FTS5. See Reference: Session store.
15. Can I embed the agent loop as a library?
Yes. agent.New(provider, registry, logger, opts).Turn(ctx, session) is stable. See the embedding example in examples/embed-agent.
16. How do I upgrade?
For minor releases: go install …@vX.Y.Z or replace the binary with a signed release. See Migrations: Overview.
17. How do I downgrade?
Reinstall the previous version. If the new schema was written, restore sessions.db from backup.
18. Is there a UI?
The Bubble Tea TUI (rousseau chat) and the transports themselves. There's no web dashboard.
19. Where do I ask questions?
20. How do I report a bug?
GitHub Issues with rousseau version + rousseau doctor output.