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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, WSL2, and macOS (launchd) today. One-liner:

curl -fsSL https://inferroute.ai/steward/install.sh | bash

Prefer to see each step? pipx install the-steward && pipx ensurepath && steward init. 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), or macOS with launchd — the local watch runs on both. On a Mac the watch/deep-floor/digest install as launchd agents; on a laptop that sleeps, --mode gha (run in the repo's GitHub Actions) is the better choice and steward init says so.

  • 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

One line (macOS + Linux) — installs everything isolated with pipx, offers anything system-level, guides your key, and opens the onboarding dashboard:

curl -fsSL https://inferroute.ai/steward/install.sh | bash

Step by step, if you'd rather. The package is on PyPI (proprietary, licensed for evaluation — see License):

pipx install the-steward      # or: pip install the-steward  into a venv
pipx ensurepath               # first pipx package? this puts `steward` on your PATH (then open a new shell)
steward init                  # preflight + economy on-ramp + opens your local dashboard

If steward says "command not found", that's the PATH step above — run pipx ensurepath and open a new terminal; the tool is installed, your shell just can't see ~/.local/bin yet. 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

No always-on machine? Run it in your repo's own GitHub Actions

Local mode assumes a box that stays on. If your project deploys elsewhere and your machine sleeps, a repo can instead run the whole loop in its own GitHub Actions — the watch is a scheduled workflow, investigation runs in your repo's real CI, results live on a steward-state branch, and verified fixes arrive as pull requests gated by your checks.

steward track <repo> --mode gha        # guided install: preflight → config → workflow
steward track <repo> --mode gha --dry  # print the full plan first, change nothing

The install tells you the steps only you can do (set the inference credential as a repo secret, commit and push the workflow it writes, dispatch the first run). Notes: your repo should be private — the install writes Steward runner files into it, and shipping logs to a public repo is refused; per-repo Actions minutes are consumed on your account; and the schedule is best-effort (GitHub cron), so think hours, not seconds.

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.

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