Concepts
Scopes
Section titled “Scopes”Everything Cengrid remembers or can do is attached to a scope.
| Scope | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Organisation | Your whole deployment. Org-wide settings and capabilities. |
| Team | A group of people and rooms sharing capabilities, instructions and a model. |
| Person | One employee. Their DMs, memory, files, keychain and sandbox. |
| Room | A shared channel, space or web room. Its own memory, files, crons, apps and sandbox. |
A direct message always runs in the person’s personal scope, on every platform. A room keeps its conversation, and everything else it uses lives in its team: a room in a team has no capabilities of its own and reads those of the organisation and its team. See teams and rooms.
The core
Section titled “The core”A generic, headless core runs every turn. It owns identity, policy, the scheduler and the agent loop. The loop runs on Pi with models from several vendors. Postgres holds all durable state, so the core can run blue-green and across several instances. See models.
Sandboxes
Section titled “Sandboxes”Each person, and each team for the rooms in it, gets its own isolated, durable sandbox, a computer where the agent runs commands through its execute tool. Installed tools stay installed. Per-command time limits apply, and long work belongs in background execution or shorter steps. Credentials stay in the core’s encrypted keychain, and brokered connections never hand the secret to the sandbox.
Where the sandbox runs depends on the deployment target: local containers on Docker, Sprites computers on Fly, and Lambda MicroVMs on AWS. See targets.
Platforms
Section titled “Platforms”Chat platforms sit behind one contract and share one identity model. Slack runs in-process in core. Google Chat and the web are served over the core’s HTTP API. The admin console, web UI and portal are separate plugins. See Slack and Google Chat.
Capabilities
Section titled “Capabilities”A capability is anything a turn can reach that an administrator chooses per scope: instructions, skills, agents, MCP servers, connections, environments and apps. Most arrive from GitHub repositories as plugins, and administrators add them to the organisation or a team.
Connections and the keychain
Section titled “Connections and the keychain”A connection is one configured account or service identity. Shared connections are set up by administrators for the organisation or a team. Personal connections live in a person’s Keychain and are usable only in their private scope, or in a shared room with the owner’s approval. Secrets live in the encrypted keychain. See connections.
The deployment directory
Section titled “The deployment directory”A deployment is a committed, portable directory. cengrid.config.jsonc holds the config, with no secret values. A sandbox/ folder adds tools and skills, and .env supplies secrets locally and is never committed. The cengrid CLI validates it and deploys it. See the deployment directory.