Read these when you want a picture, not a manual
Use cases are short narratives. Each one describes a plausible operator, the problem they face, and the exact configuration they would use. Every use case is one page — read whichever matches your situation.
| Use case | Persona | Problem |
|---|---|---|
| On-call buddy | Solo SRE, small company. | 3 a.m. Slack page, triage before you're fully awake. |
| Mobile PR review | Individual developer on a commute. | Review pull requests from your phone. |
| Regulated industry | Financial services team. | Coding agent inside a Bedrock-hosted VPC with pattern-mode approval. |
These are illustrative, not exhaustive — rousseau's design generalises. If your situation resembles one of these, start there.
What every use case has in common
- A single Go binary in a rootless container.
- One transport per instance (a Slack, or a WhatsApp, or a Signal — pick one).
- A
pattern-mode approver with sensible deny rules. - Session state in SQLite, so a restart doesn't lose the conversation.
- No SaaS control plane, no telemetry endpoint, no license server.
What varies
- Provider —
claudeclifor individual laptops,bedrock/vertexfor regulated environments,openai-compatible for self-hosted vLLM. - Transport — pick the medium engineers already use.
- Approval policy — tighter in high-stakes environments; looser inside a locked-down container.
- Deployment surface — laptop, single-node Podman, Kubernetes.
Next
- On-call buddy — the most common story.
- Mobile PR review — the reason WhatsApp is the reference transport.
- Regulated industry — the enterprise story.