the-steward 0.1.0

The Steward — a continuously-watching guardian that spends intelligence only on novelty, investigates it to a decision-ready conclusion, verifies against reality over time, and surfaces exactly what a human or an agent needs. The flagship inferroute application.

The Steward

A guardian that watches your repos overnight, spends intelligence only on what's new, investigates it to a decision, and hands you a short morning brief — not a firehose.

The Steward sits beside your projects. Most of the time it does nothing but watch (cheap, local, no inference). When something genuinely changes — a new error in your logs, a risky commit, a regression — it spins up an isolated worktree, investigates with an LLM, verifies the finding against reality, and either fixes it on a branch or writes it up. In the morning you read one digest.

Status: early access for friends. Linux (and WSL2) today; macOS scheduling is in progress. Install with pipx install the-steward. See INSTALL.

What it does

• Watches your tracked git repos + their logs locally, on a timer. No inference until something is new.
• Investigates novelty in a throwaway git worktree — never your working tree, never your branches.
• Verifies findings against the real repo (it won't surface a fix for a file that doesn't exist).
• Scrubs secrets out of anything before it leaves your machine for the model.
• Briefs you each morning — read it in the dashboard (localhost:5057) or steward review.

Requirements

• Linux with systemd --user (or WSL2 with systemd enabled). macOS isn't supported yet — steward init will stop with that message.

• Python ≥ 3.10, git, tmux, and bash.

• Claude Code — the claude CLI is the agent harness the Steward drives to investigate; steward init hard-checks for it. Install: https://claude.com/code

• An inferroute account for the economy lane (the recommended way to run — cheap, always-on compute that keeps the overnight watch affordable):

  1. pipx install 'inferroute>=0.3.28' (0.3.28+ required — it honors the Steward's write-scoping)
  2. Sign up at https://inferroute.ai — early-access friends start with a small $5 credit headstart on their own account; top up with your own credits once you've kicked the tires.
  3. ir login (paste your key) — or ir setup for the guided first-run.

  Escape hatch: you can instead bring your own Anthropic/Claude key (ir anthropic / BYO), but the economy lane is what makes always-on watching cheap, so it's the default.

Install

The package is on PyPI (proprietary, licensed for evaluation — see License):

pipx install the-steward      # or: pip install the-steward  into a venv
steward init                  # preflight + economy on-ramp + your local dashboard

Update any time with pipx upgrade the-steward. steward init runs a preflight (checks your tools + that your inferroute economy login is funded, with the exact fix for anything missing), then installs your local dashboard and points you to it.

Pick your projects in the dashboard — http://localhost:5057 — where you discover repos, see each one's fit (evaluated for you), and start watching the ones you want. That's the main way to drive it.

steward review            # the morning digest (auto-runs each morning; run any time)
steward status <repo>     # a repo's health from the terminal
# headless / no browser? pick from the terminal instead:
steward discover          # list watchable repos
steward track <repo>      # watch one   ·   steward untrack <repo> to stop   ·   steward onboard for a TUI

Privacy

• The watch loop is fully local — zero inference, zero egress.
• When an investigation runs, context is scrubbed of secrets before it reaches the model.
• Fleet telemetry (run/turn metadata to improve the tuning loops) is configurable: steward shows the setting at setup; turn it off to ship nothing. (See INSTALL for the current default and exactly what's sent.)

What it is NOT (yet)

• Not open source — it's on PyPI, but under a proprietary evaluation license: run it on your own machines, but don't redistribute, fork, or use it commercially.
• Not an OS-level sandbox — point it at your own repos, not untrusted code. Agents run in throwaway worktrees, but a misbehaving agent with shell access could still read files in your home dir.

License

Proprietary — © 2026 Henry Declety. Licensed to early-access users for evaluation only: you may run it on your own machines, but not redistribute, fork, or use it commercially. See LICENSE.