Comparison
The most common alternative to vahue is no product at all: everyone runs their own agent — Claude Code, Codex, Goose — on their own machine, alone. Great for one person. Then a second person joins, and things quietly break. This page is about what breaks, and what vahue adds without touching your agent.
None of these are agent problems. Your agent is fine. It's the missing layer around the agents that's eating your team.
The agent that spent an hour learning your reporting conventions forgets all of it tonight. Your colleague's agent learns it again tomorrow. Your team keeps buying knowledge it already paid for — a subscription to its own amnesia.
What did the agent actually do? What did it cost? What came back? With standalone agents there is no shared history, no audit trail, and no way to build on a colleague's run. The work happened; the evidence didn't.
Everyone assembles their own instructions, tools, and connections. Onboarding a new hire means a day of copying someone's dotfiles — and the person who figured something out last month is the only one who still knows it.
vahue is not a replacement for your agent. It's the room your agent works in.
| Axis | With vahue | Standalone agents |
|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Hosted — sign up and invite the team in minutes; self-host if you prefer | Everyone installs, configures, and maintains their own setup |
| Your agent | Unchanged — same local agent, same credentials, same model choice; now connected to a room over ACP and MCP | Whatever you run today, exactly as you run it |
| Session start | Your agent is rehydrated with what the channel knows — trusted entries first — before it sees your prompt | Starts from zero, or from whatever you remembered to paste in |
| When work finishes | The conclusion enters the channel's memory with provenance; files are offered to you, and what you accept becomes a channel artifact | The conversation ends; the knowledge evaporates with the session |
| A colleague continues | Their agent — a different one, on their machine — starts where yours stopped, because the room holds the knowledge | They start over, or you forward chat logs like it's 2019 |
| Visibility | Every run streams its steps to the channel: who ran what, what it cost, what it produced — attributed and auditable | None, outside each person's terminal |
| Shared how-to | Skills live in the channel, written by people, discoverable through the rail — one standard, no drift | Everyone curates their own; the best setup belongs to whoever built it, and leaves when they do |
No hostage situations. Adding the room costs you nothing you already had.
vahue binds to protocols, not to an agent. Whatever speaks ACP works — and whatever wins next year will too.
Execution stays local and model credentials never leave your laptop. The server coordinates, records, and remembers — it never runs your agent, and it never sees a key. Not "we promise not to". The code path doesn't exist.
Repositories and documents stay where they are. Nothing uploads unless you explicitly accept the offer — every byte that leaves your machine is your decision.